PSYCHO, TOO

PSYCHO II (1983)
dir: Richard Franklin

MAD #244, January 1984
w: Dick DeBartolo
a: Mort Drucker

Twenty-two years later, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is allowed to go back into the world having spent time in a mental institution.He's been deemed cured of the split personality he had believing he was his dead mother and going on a killing spree dressed up as her. His psychiatrist Dr. Raymond (Robert Loggia) has promised to keep a watchful eye on him despite protests from Lila Loomis (Vera Miles), sister of one of his victims. The Bates motel is now under the management of Warren Toomet (Dennis Franz), who has turned the place into a “no-tell motel”

The stenographer is Martin Balsam, another victim from the first movie. “Mack the Knife” was a popular song when the first movie came out

Norman returns to the mansion where he lived and takes a job at a local diner, and keeps getting threating notes from his “mother”. He takes in Mary (Meg Tilly), a waitress at the diner, after she has been kicked out of her house. He won't let her stay in his mother's old room, as he wants to keep it as it was and it brings up so many bad memories. There is a peephole in the bathroom with his mother's room on the other side, which doesn't seem unusual to her.

Norman keeps getting threatening notes, which he dismisses as a practical joke. The basement to the mansion above the motel, which had been abandoned all these years, has become a hangout for teenagers to make out and smoke pot, and one of the teenagers is killed while Norman is locked in the attic (not shown). The sheriff gets a report on the missing body, goes to investigate, and Mary covers for him. He feels he must have blacked out and done it, as it's the only explanation. It's revealed that Mary is really Lila's daughter, they'd planned on pretending to be Norman's mother and doing the killings themselves in order to drive Norman insane and have him recommitted, but Mary now wants no part of it. He thinks his mother is still alive. Someone is making calls, and Mary insists it's Lila. Dr. Raymond visits him bings him to the graveyard to have the body exhumed to prove she's still dead.

Lila continues the ruse and sneaks into Norman's basement to get the mother costume that's under a stone there, but gets murdered by someone else pretending to be the mother. Inside the mansion, Norman is getting calls, which Mary insists is Lila carrying on the charade, and dresses as his mother to possibly talk him down. She accidentally kills a visiting Dr, Raymond, then gets shot by a sheriff who visits and shoots Mary. The case is dismissed as Lila and Mary messing with Norman's head and he continues with his life. After life returns to normal, he's visited by Mrs. Spool (Claudia Bryar), who was his real mother, left him when he was a baby, and has been doing the killings all along. Norman Bates kills her with a shovel, brings the corpse upstairs, and starts all over again where the first movie began.

When the British edition reprinted the parody, they put it on the cover.

So did the Mexican edition.