Psycho 2 (1983, Richard Franklin)
Hadn't seen it in ages. It just came out on blu-ray from Arrow Video. There are loads of extras, including commentary by writer Tom Holland, a 45 minute talk with Holland and Mick Garris, 20 minute audio interview with director Franklin, and a lot of extras which are more like snippets: interviews with Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles etc.
There is also a fun feature, which is an electronic press kit made for radio stations, which consists of interview fragments from Hitchcock, Perkins etc. with promotion for the film in between. You can play it over the film, it does get a bit repetitive (like watching tv-spots of films there is a lot of repetition), but I'll gladly sit through it, just to hear Hitchcock alone. In the end Hitchcock wasn't a big talker, he has these famous quotes (everyone knows them), but he repeated them often. There are still some things I never heard though.
Also Arrow blu-rays and dvd's always come with beautiful little booklets with great photos, academic viewings of the film, and further interviews (or an excerpt from a book in this case).
MAJOR SPOILERS from the film from now on:
Even though I like the film, the story feels contrived to me. First of all, if you were the psychiatrist of Norman Bates and you got him free, would you deliver him right to the place where all the bad things happened. Yet his doctor delivers him personally at the door and leaves him there, even though the first thing Norman sees is someone in the window.
Then he gets a job in a diner. He works for mrs. Spool. Now as it turns out at the very end mrs. Spool is his REAL mother and mrs. Bates whose body he kept all these years was his aunt. Yet she doesn't seem to show any emotion at all seeing her son after all this time - of course that would have given too much away, but it's strange in retrospect that she can just work with him as seemingly strangers.
Mary, a girl working also at the diner, stays with Norman at his mansion, but it turns out she is the daughter of Lila Crane (now called Lila Loomis, probably because she married Sam Loomis - but no word about him in the film, so I wonder why they took the trouble of renaming her). Lila uses her daughter to try to get on Norman's nerves and have him turn homicidal and commited again - so not only does she want to risk more murders, but she also exposes her daughter to the danger.
In the end, the movie is a reversal of the first: in the first you think it was Mother doing the killing, but it was Norman. Here it seems Norman is driven to murder again, yet it was his REAL mother who was on to Mary and Lila. The last contrivance being that she didn't warn her son earlier, but let him get (nearly) insane again first.
Now this all sounds like I'm terribly critical of it, but I like the film. It just doesn't hold well together. What I love is that while the first film is mainly set at the motel, the second takes place mostly at the mansion. It is the same mansion from the first film and many of the people who worked on it the first time came back, experiencing strong memories of course.
Perkins and Meg Tilly are great and suit the film well. It looks beautiful on blu-ray - you can often see now when matte shots are used, but they give it a painterly quality at times - there is a beautiful wide night-shot outside the diner.
There is a good score from Jerry Goldsmith and some fun gore moments (brief, in keeping with the original). There is also a 'cameo' from Hitchcock shortly after his death: look at the closet to the right when Perkins first shows Tilly Mother's room early on - there is a silhouette of Hitch, a fitting tribute.
So despite the story problems, a fun sequel overall and a great release.
