Psycho II (1983)

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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The Sitter (1991)

Despite its oh-so-laboured set-up and oh-so-laboured dialogue, this uncinematic 90-minute flick is good movie-night-in fun for psycho thriller fans, featuring a babysitter who reveals, on her first night on the job minding a kid in a swanky hotel, that she is a rank nutter prepared to cosh any number of hotel guests over the head to continue revelling in her delusions!

★★★☆☆

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Fear (1997)

Sarah McLachlan's "Wild Horses" plays whenever Nicole (Reese Witherspoon) believes things are good between her and David (Mark Wahlberg), like during rollercoaster sex, but at other times angry thrash metal plays and David doles out a black eye to Nicole, drives like a maniac, cheats, engages in grimy partner-swap sex, and in a laughable homage to "Cape Fear" meant to confirm David a right looney tune, he self-tattoos "NICOLE 4 EVA" across his torso with black biro ink as dissonate chords crescendo, but the genuinely tense abusive relationship that develops between the teens is muddied in the last half of this psycho thriller with David turning out to be as much a lawless gangbanging squatter with daddy issues as he is obsessive about Nicole.

★★☆☆☆

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Basic Instinct (1992)

If you can get past the fact the sweaty suited detectives are all males indistinguishable from each other and the women are all deviants whose perverse sexual desires the men must sigh and resignedly sate, then this is for most of its runtime a solid thriller with Michael Douglas doing a good job playing Michael Douglas playing a detective, and Sharon Stone channelling Vertigo's Kim Novak to play the cop's prime murder suspect-with-benefits, a mystery novelist whose bed-partners end up dead by ice-pick.

★★★☆☆

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Unforgettable (2017)

Unforgettable is precisely what this psycho thriller is not with Katherine Heigl playing an uptight 'Bree Van de Kamp' type ex-wife determined to ruin her ex-husband's new partner's life by browsing through her stolen mobile phone, wearing the dresses she likes, catfishing her former abusive partner, accusing her of violence, and other forgettable midday movie stuff like that.

★☆☆☆☆

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Blue Steel (1990)

I like Kathryn Bigelow's gripping Blue Steel about a rookie cop who just 24 hours into the job blasts away a supermarket robber, has her badge taken away and ends up the object of a gun-fetishist's psychopathy, and I like it so much I've watched it three times now, but full of awful policework and characters' really dumb decisions, it is best considered a slice of throwaway psychosexual horror (with horror stalwart Jamie Lee Curtis really just terrorised by another nightmarish Michael or Fog) than a more meaningful thriller/drama - there's nothing intelligent said, for instance, about gun violence or female cops or male violence.

★★★☆☆

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Psycho (1960)

A woman steals from her boss, goes on the run, and ends up in a chilling encounter with a psychopath at the Bates Motel in this Hitchcock thriller that really did introduce "a new and altogether different screen excitement" to cinema.

★★★★★

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Psycho (1998)

This is a 1998 remake of Hitchcock's 1960 thriller about a woman who goes missing after visiting a roadside motel, with so much identical to the original that it begs the question why it needed to be remade at all, particularly given everything about it is so constrained by what has come before that even the A-list stars seem like thinly disguised, taxidermied versions of their past counterparts, conspicuous in a hand-me-down wardrobe of fedoras, black skivvies, flared pant legs, and delivering lines too readily like actors going through the motions of an over-rehearsed play.

★★☆☆☆

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Obsessed (2009)

A not very tightly scripted, low-grade suspense thriller in the vein of Disclosure and Fatal Attraction (a decent, upwardly-mobile corporate go-getting man has his life upended by a manipulative woman) is tolerable due to the good performances of future James Bond, Idris Elba as the beset man and Ali Larter, effective as the single-minded femme fatale.

★★☆☆☆

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