Sick Product of a Sick System

Overrated

Expected more

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Opening scene, a black-and-white sunrise over the Bates Motel, is a good, atmospheric touch, until we realise the footage was lifted from Psycho II, getting things off to a cheap, tacky start.Some good set designs are about all this turkey has going for it, as Bates' former asylum roommate is willed the Bates Motel, by the now deceased (in this film, anyway) Norman Bates. What could possibly go wrong with an ex-mental patient returning to the scene of a very violent crime? And I'm sorry to keep repeating myself and bringing this up, however, the Bates Motel should have been demolished decades earlier, not only because of the murders which occurred there, but also because the highway built in the 1950s (mentioned by Norman Bates in the original Psycho) routed traffic away from that road.Wide eyed, boyish looking Bud Cort is awful, and the screen writing in this Psycho meets wannabe Twilight Zone was as bland as could be. I don't have a problem with there being no murder, and no act of on- screen violence committed, what I do have a problem with was the inept screen writing, killing off Bates for the sake of a proposed weekly television series, and for what? So we can watch Cort's character mundanely and uneventfully running to motel? Or watch as he slowly goes mad, and is driven to kill, in extremely predictable fashion?

As someone who really loves his horror films but will delve into other genres this film is something I went into watching with an open heart. The name never said Psycho to me or anything to do with the actual Psycho franchise but then again it doesn't need to be a part of the franchise because it's got a completely new story of its own. Let's move onto the cast, the cast is a bit of a weird line up but then again I think that's what made me continue watching it and yes it's actually got a story to it and tries to take helm from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho franchise. I know I'm not really reviewing this movie and explaining much about it and that's because I don't really know what to say, what I will say is…. If you can grab a copy of this very rare film just watch it for the way it plays out, you may just enjoy, I know I did, maybe you'll book a night at the Bates Hotel just like myself.

I don't know what a lot of these posters are bitchin' about. What the H E double hockey sticks did they expect from a pilot for a TV series? Did they really to see Norman Bates on social security still running around in drag knocking off people in the shower or something of the like? Wouldn't that get boring after an episode or two? With that being said, I thought the creative way they blended the Bates story with some new mystery and a ghost story set a pretty good stage for some decent TV. Guess it was all that closed mindedness and lack of vision from the pubic that stopped that from happening. It's bad too, we could have had another 80s cult show.

I've been getting bugged for years for copies of this film -- since it hardly ever got played after it bombed on TV back in '87. As a piece of Psycho history, I taped it in '87 and foolishly let people know that I had a copy.... I'm so glad Sci-fi is airing it so I don't have to sit through it anymore. Made as a potential pilot for an anthology series, the movie flopped badly and a show never materialized. Anthony Perkins (Norman Bates himself) boycotted the production. Not that he really needed to, since the public hated it as much as he did....I'd like to say this film is awful. But I can't really say that, since I've seen so much worse. But as an attachment to the Psycho films, it IS awful. It ignores the two sequels that had been made and even makes mistakes based on information from the original. Bud Cort gives a mind-numbingly dumb performance as the friend of Norman's who inherits the motel after his death. You never really have sympathy for him 'cause he just plays it so dumb. Lori Petti, who I usually love, is rather annoying as the squatter that befriends him. She does an okay job with her part, but the problem is that all the main parts were poorly written. We get more than half of the way through the movie, focusing on Cort and Petti trying to get the motel running again, and then we enter the first of the Twilight-Zone-ish stories: a woman who wants to kill herself is befriended by some strange teens. The writing and acting in this segment isn't bad, but after sitting through the Cort/Petti story, it hardly seems worth it. There's really only one creepy segment in the film -- the presence of the woman in black at Mrs. Bates funeral (but the discovery of her corpse is nonsense, since they found her body in the basement in the original film). The whole Jake Bates story seemed like it was jammed in so they could add a few more scares, though the scares fell flat. And the black-and-white segment at the film's climax could have been great -- if they hadn't went the Scooby-Doo unmask-the-villain route -- but as another reviewer wrote, it seemed to be the inspiration for "Scream 3" (which I love, by the way). Though the film is a piece of Psycho history, I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone, except maybe fans of the actors -- even then it wouldn't get a strong recommendation....