Bringing Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates back to the screen twenty-three years after the original Hitchcock classic required an audaciousness you really have to admire - especially given this sequel sees him released from prison and getting a kitchenhand job (!) - and it is surprising, given this absurd setup, how strong it is at the outset, nostalgically recalling the original, with a short-haired heroine stumbling into the danger of a gothic hilltop home and neighbouring motel, taking showers and discovering peepholes while Californian cops in pilot-shades drain swamps, explore cellars, and tail suspects through town; yet bringing Bates back also sadly requires some clumsy writing in which grisly murder is committed with zero clean-up, bodies vanish, cops scoff and dismiss witness accounts of murder in a famed murder house, and lots of other highly unlikely behaviour occurs from characters maintaining an impossible flippancy about their close proximity to a famed serial killer - it is all the mess of writers desperately trying to perpetuate an unlikely series with, by the film's end, a complete cleaning of the slate and a reversion back to the beginning of Psycho to where it all started.
★★★☆☆
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