Episode 155: The PSYCHO Series

The Wages of Cinema

What started as a pulp author doing a tawdry riff on the Ripped-from-the-Headlines saga of Wisconsin mass murderer Ed Gein somehow turned into - via one of the superlative True Entertainers of his century in the medium, Alfred Hitchcock - a series! (though mostly after he died, funny that, but anyway). This is a story all about how Norman Bates got twisted upside down, we'd like for you to take a little moment and sit right there and hear a story about... the Bates Motel, and Detective Arbogast, and that guy Dennis Franz plays in Psycho II, and so on. And how about Olivia Hussey's breasts?! But we're getting ahead of ourselves. It's not only the 60th anniversary of the seminal horror thriller, the one that made a generation afraid to go into their showers ever again (citation needed), or to speak frankly to their mothers and/or behoove them to take them down to the fruit cellar, it's the 30th anniversary of Psycho IV: The Beginning, which... well, we'll certainly get to that (and "Trash Panda" Korey talks about the Bates Motel in the last ten minutes or so of the episode). Come with us, take room 1, and listen to our retrospective review of the PSYCHO movies! (Except for the remake, we don't acknowledge that here, oh wait...) oh and SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS! 1) PSYCHO (1960) (from 2 mins in to 45 min) 2) PSYCHO II (1983) (46 min) 3) PSYCHO III (1986) (1 hr 6 min) 4) PSYCHO IV: THE BEGINNING (1990) (1 hr 19 min) All clips from the film for fair use, as well as Busta Rhymes song "Gimme Some More". Score by Bernard Herrmnann and Jerry Goldsmith. [e-mail]