Psycho II
This week the From Below Microcinema is showing the first installment in our sequel series, August 2: Return to August, with Psycho II (1983) on Thursday, August 1, at 8pm.
Here is the link to reserve a seat. Doors will be at 7:50 and we’re starting the movie at 8:10!
It’s easy to hate sequels for all too often being the gauche, substance-less, unoriginal money-grabs they are. It’s just to revile the sequel’s tomb-robber instinct to wrench the lid off a tidily sealed coffin and resurrect the peaceful corpse for a shambling, artless jig.
This August the From Below will be exploring five sequels that are “actually supposed to be pretty good” in search of new diamonds in the rough. We’ll be showing some forgotten, under-seen, or prematurely written-off sequels that have allegedly beaten the odds to have some artistic merit. First up is a Hitchcock-less *Psycho II *(1983) directed by Ozploitation master Richard Franklin. Anthony Perkins reprises his iconic role as Norman Bates twenty-three years after the original *Psycho * (1960) launched the slasher film genre. The 1970s and 80s saw an international horror renaissance with developments upon the slasher visual vocabulary and story telling mechanics that were major departures from its *Psycho *auteur origins. Like Norman Bates’ identity-splitting struggle to relate to a new life after returning home from the hospital to a someways changed world, *Psycho II *arrives in a revamped thriller media landscape it once helped inaugurate that’s fermented in its absence, transformed and now defined by the lucrative financial successes of the horror franchise model with *Friday the 13th Part 2 *(1981) and *3 *(1982), *The Omen III: Final Conflict *(1981), and *Halloween II (1981). *How will *Psycho II *fair bridging this gap?