Three Films Make A Post: Norman Bates is back home with Mother again!

Psycho III (1986): At the time when this was made, critics inexplicably saw this second Psycho sequel as clearly superior to the actually brilliant second one (about which I’ll hopefully write someday). I simply can’t see it: Anthony Perkins’s direction is bland and often aims for a sub-Ken Russell style of camp he’s simply not good enough a director to reach, the script is obvious and not very interesting, and even Perkins’s performance is lacking the element of humanity he found in the Hitchcock original and even more so in the second movie.

Otherwise, this repeats a couple of the least interesting plot beats of film number two and has scenes that “nod” to the original in a way only Gus Van Sant’s shot-by-shot reshoot managed to surpass in pointlessness.

Watcher (2022): On paper, Chloe Okuno’s thriller about an American woman either becoming paranoid or becoming the future victim of a killer in Bucharest is yet another “Girl/Woman in the Whatever” thriller, this time with quite a few direct homages to Hitchcock (that guy again). But Okuno manages to actually recontextualize the Hitchcockian elements and use them to build a female perspective that runs parallel as well as against Hitchcock’s often creepily male one, enriching a genre while clearly following most of its rules. The film’s visual style and feel also very pleasantly reminded me of the best giallos as well as a little of Don’t Look Now. Add to this highly focussed and effective performances, particularly by genre stalwarts Maika Monroe and Burn Gorman, and you have quite the film.

Patience (After Sebald) (2012): Ending on an equally high note, there’s this hypnotic documentary by Grant Gee that follows the traces of W.G. Sebald and his great book “The Rings of Saturn” in a manner as digressive and complicated as its subject.

Most of what would usually be talking heads in this kind of film comes from the off, which leaves space for longer thoughts and sentences and enables Gee to strengthen and deepen, or counterpoint, ideas via his successful attempts at recreating the mood and style of Sebald’s photography. The film’s understanding of how important mood is for its subject is rather impressive anyway; it also explains why this needs to be a movie instead of a monograph.

In short: Edge of Sanity (1989)

A very late (19)80s version of Victorian London. Genius physician and medical researcher Dr Henry Jekyll (Anthony Perkins) uses cocaine and other substances in his attempts to open the doors of perception a couple of decades early. After a monkey-related accident, he gets a full dose of his experimental concoction, and turns into a guy in bad panto make-up calling himself Jack Hyde (still Anthony Perkins, but in the aforementioned bad panto makeup, obviously). Where Jekyll simply represses his sex drive – even towards his wife Elisabeth (Glynis Barber) – Jekyll is a full-on sexual sadist. He’s heavily into prostitutes and loves to involve them in various kinky and often violent scenarios that do tend to end in him murdering them. Soon, the streets of New Wavechapel are terrorized by a certain Jack the Ripper.

Watching Gérard Kikoïne’s very weird and very 80s Jekyll & Hyde/Jack the Ripper mash-up Edge of Sanity I could never shake the impression Kikoïne really rather wanted to make Ken Russell’s Jekyll & Hyde, or possibly Ken Russell’s Emmanuelle. The problem there is of course that Kikoïne is no Ken Russell (as little as I get along with Russell as a filmmaker) but really a somewhat ambitious and highly prolific softcore filmmaker who somehow managed to get enough money out of good old Harry Alan Towers and co to hire Anthony Perkins for his very own overblown, sleazy Jekyll & Hyde movie. Perkins for his part is in all-out scenery-chewing mode even when he’s Jekyll, doing bizarre line-readings of the film’s awkward and melodramatic dialogue there, and opening up to his inner Klaus Kinski when it’s time to grab some – well, a lot of, actually – breasts, help out a young lady in her stick masturbation, and do a bit of murder. It’s still a better version of the Joker than Joaquin Phoenix did.

Anyway, thematically, this thing is probably meant to attack the always returning spirit of puritanism and sexual repression by overloading it with sleazy sexual imagery, but the plotting and writing is generally so bizarre and uncontrolled, you could just as well sell me on it as a parable on the religious impulse, or something about strikes.

While there’s little sense or characterisation or actual character exploration to be found, Edge does have a manic energy nearly as huge as the one shown by Perkins. The film’s basically cackling going from scene to scene, throwing 80s fashion not really pretending to be Victorian, lovely, ultra-artificial light, uncomfortable sex, Perkins, Ken Russell rip-off moments, sleaze and whatever else seems to have come into the filmmakers’ heads at the viewer with what feels like intense glee. All of which is shot beautifully by Tony Spratling, to make things feel even stranger, I suppose.

It’s quite the thing, really. Probably not the best movie to watch with the whole family, or to see expecting for things to come together, but certainly the kind of film worth the time of anyone who can appreciate a bit of misguided ambition and weird intensity.