| Bates Motel Released: (1987) MPAA Rating: PG Genre: Suspense Thriller Nuts and Bolts: Alex West inherits that drab run down piece of shit known as the Bates Motel. But just because Alex has the luxury of being a former loony-bird, it doesn’t absolve him of the day-to-day responsibilities of kick-starting his own do-it-yourself home improvement operation. (Queue the Trading Spaces theme song) Summary: Don’t let the title of this made for TV monstrosity fool you. This flick is NOT about everybody’s favorite quivering taxidermist Norman Bates. But rather, it centers on a squirrelly social misfit known as Alex West. Now Alex has a bit of a somber past. When he was six years old he lived with an abusive stepfather who owned a dry cleaning business. Little Alex decided that he was tired of being perpetually slapped silly by the old man and shoved his ass into an industrial sized dryer. And he DIDN’T set it for fluff if you know what I’m sayin’. So because of this, the powers that be decided to send the nutso kid to the Dunsmore Sanitarium in Fairville, California. During his stay there, Alex befriended the one and only Norman Bates. Norman more or less figured that his days were numbered, and there was no way he would ever see the light of day again. So he decides to take little Alex under his wing and school him in the ways of being a true blue psychopath. Uhh…err…I mean. He shows him how to be a neat and model citizen. Yeah. Sure. Anyway, twenty-seven years later, Norman Bates decides to ignore his own continuity and shuffles off the mortal coil. Yes, that’s right kiddos. Norman Bates DIES! The nature of his death is unknown, and it really doesn’t matter since the producers only included his back-story as a means of padding their otherwise weak television pilot. But on his deathbed, Norman leaves everything he owns to Alex. This basically means, that Alex gets the motel and that badass creepy old house where Norman grew up. (For those of you who are Psycho-challenged, the afore-mentioned badass house sits atop a hill directly behind the family motel. It was also a fan favorite tourist attraction of Universal Studios for many years). Shortly after this affair, the good people at Dunsmore decide that Alex is now fit to re-enter society. Which is quite amusing really when you consider that the kid has been locked inside of a rubber room since he was six-years-old! Taking his first breath of fresh L.A. air, he fumbles around town trying desperately to find a way to get to the motel. He hitches a ride with a guy named Henry Watson. Upon mentioning the Bates Motel, Henry becomes agitated and begins recalling the story of Norman Bates (And if you don’t know what that story is, then you should be ashamed for ever clawing your way out of your mother’s rotten womb and you have no business mucking about on a Horror Movie website). Henry drops Alex off and we get to see the dramatic view of the motel and main house. Alex goes into the house and amazingly, not a whole helluva lot has changed. The power is still up and running, the furniture hasn’t been stolen and Norman’s stuffed pigeons are still stapled to every mantelpiece and lintel. Hell, the motel itself even has the same old dust-covered ledger with Marie Samuels’ signature (Marion Crane’s alias from the original movie) lying on top of the reception desk. Rather than stay in the house proper, Alex decides he wants to spend the night in the infamous Room #1. As soon as he beds down, the audience notices a light turning on inside the upstairs bedroom window of the main house. At this point, we are meant to throw our popcorn bowl into the air, spill our favorite glass of libation and shriek, “Mrs. Bates lives!” But no, it’s not Mrs. Bates. Actually it’s a six foot yellow fucking chicken. No, I’m not kidding. The chicken can wait for now however. The following day, Alex goes to the bank. He meets with loan officer Tom Fuller and explains that he wants to nab some quick cash so he can fix up the motel and turn it into a respectable place. Tom is a greedy opportunist, and he mistakenly believes that Alex is a developer who is going to raze the whole place and erect a string of condos. But Tom pretends to fall in line with Alex’s whole hippie grassroots thing and slides him a few Benjamins. So now Alex is happier than Saddam Hussein at a yellow pound cake bake-off and rushes back to the motel. However, the big yellow chicken is lying in wait. And believe you me; this bird is not your average cock. Enter: Willie (Lori Petty). Willie is a street smart New Yorker chick who has come to California to entertain the hordes of fast food junkies by parading around in a chicken outfit. She is actually striving to dig herself out of a hole of homeless mediocrity in the hopes of becoming a respectable Hollywood actress. Oddly, this fanciful dream mirrors that of the actress who portrays her as well. Go figure. Willie takes off her chicken head and begins snapping and quipping about how she’s such a badass even though she wears a chicken suit. Alex is pretty much bedazzled by her shrill voice and just sits there quivering. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much all he does throughout the entire movie. Willie takes it upon herself to be Alex’s business partner. Alex doesn’t want anything to do with her mind you…but he’s so frikkin’ terrified of the bulldog that he pretty much lets her hold his balls for him. And Willie’s influence begins almost immediately. The following day, Alex begins gathering together a crew to help him remodel the hotel. Some shyster architect begins spouting off his ideas of including a spa, and a food court and all this other dumb shit until Willie tells him to go fuck himself. Alex ends up hiring the handyman Henry Watson; the guy who gave him a ride when he was first let out of the loony-shack. There’s about 15 minutes of fluff filler material involving Watson’s stand off with a sheriff and a bulldozer; some horseshit about taking a stand for what is right and not bowing down to corporate monopolies. Anyway, Alex intervenes and convinces Henry to come work for him thereby allowing the greedy corporate fat cats the ability to bulldoze down Henry’s property. Yeah, whatever. So now Alex gets a work crew together. In any other situation, I would imagine that the group would engage in some gay sing-a-long as they cut wood, sling lumber, paint walls and do all the other sugary requirements necessary for an obligatory time-elapse montage scene. And just at the moment when I’m about ready to start doing whiskey shots every time I hear Willie squeal, “Geez Alex!” something quasi-interesting finally happens in this film. One of the bulldozers unearths a coffin! A real gosh-golly honest to goodness coffin! They crack this bad boy open and discover the remains of Gloria Bates, Norman Bates’ MOTHER! Woo-Hoo! And let me tell you, ole Gloria has been reaping the benefits of the Atkins diet. A solid no-carbs diet is just what one needs when seeking to achieve that curvy skin-n-bones look. Alex calls the police and the following day, they give the dead old bitch a proper funeral. In fact people even bring hats with them, just so they can take them off as a matter of respect for the dead. As some priest rambles off some biblical shit, Alex peers off into the distance where he believes he sees the black silhouette of Gloria Bates’ ghost standing beneath an oak tree. Brrrrr. Scaaaaaaaary. To make matters even weirder, they later find the remains of Jake Bates, the father of Norman Bates, buried beneath the infamous neon sign. Apparently some fifty-odd years ago, Jake used to step out on the missus so he could go shtoop some whore in one of the motel bedrooms. Gloria would watch him come and go (and come some more) from her rocking chair set before the big window of her bedroom looking down upon the motel property. Now this second corpse begins to get the workers a little antsy. Several of them try to swear off the project, but Henry kicks their asses back into line. That evening, goofy Alex goes up to Gloria’s old bedroom and looks down towards the flashing neon sign. He swears he sees Jake Bates’ body lying in a pool of blood on the ground below. Alex races down there with Willie, but naturally the body is nowhere to be found. Willie thinks that Alex is a babbling idiot, and for the most part she’s right. Alex begins to suspect that the Bates motel may be haunted. Shortly after this, Alex finally finishes all the repairs and opens the motel back up. The place looks like some kind of dude ranch and Willie is racing around in the motel’s diner cooking meatloaf. But Alex is sweating because he needs to make the first payment of 10,000 dollars to the bank by the very next evening. Why this turkey thought he could pay 10k to the bank on the first day of business is beyond me. You would have to be seriously fucking retarded to agree to that kind of deal. I know we’re supposed to feel sorry for Alex, because he’s a patricidal simpleton, but Christ. I’m surprised this moron can even breathe on his own without an instruction manual. Stupid people make me so angry. Thankfully, we don’t have to worry about this assclown passing his idiocy down to his children, because that would indicate he would have a clue as to how to even get a girl into his bedroom. For fucks sake, Willie even tries rubbing her tits up on him and he begins convulsing and going into shock. I wish the FDA could take time away from approving the latest breast enhancement pill and develop a virus that would systematically eliminate all stupid people from the cosmos. What the fuck else is stem cell research for if we can’t use it to eradicate global idiocy? Oh well, back to the movie. Eventually, the Bates Motel gets its first customer. This would be a middle-aged woman named Sally (Whose real name is Barbara Peters). Sally has been married three times and divorced three times. Realizing that her life is about as valuable as a cum stain on a mattress, she decides to author a suicide note and then slice her wrists open while sitting in the bathtub. Before this happens however, four carloads of kids pull up and rent out the remaining room at the Bates Motel. They being hosting a 50’s style do-wop party and Alex is pressured into serving them punch and chips. Some nameless sock hopper accidentally enters Sally’s room and begins having a conversation. Sally is too polite to tell the teenage girl to fuck off until after she’s done committing suicide. So instead, she sits there in a bath towel while this vapid bitch babbles incoherently. Prom Queen decides to invite Sally to the other rooms to join the party. She reluctantly agrees and meets up with a boy named Tony Scotti (Jason Bateman). Sally and Tony dance around a bit, and Tony calls her Queen of the Prom. Tony tries to kiss her, but Sally backs away citing the obvious age difference between the two. Tony gets all bent out of shape and runs outside like the little crybaby pussy that he is. Sally follows after him and the audience suffers through twelve minutes of melodramatic sexually awkward teen angst. Save that shit for Dawson’s Creek okay? After which, Sally goes back to her room. Nothing really changes for Sally though. She still decides to end her own life. After all, the woman is barely forty and has already gone through three husbands; a clear-cut sign that she is a bad lay. Reason enough right there to kill yourself in my opinion. But just as she’s ready to go through with it, the vapid sock-hopper appears in the room again. Sally is freaking out because she knows for a fact that she locked the door after entering her room. This is where we find out that little miss ponytail is actually a ghost. In fact, everyone at the motel is a ghost. They are all a bunch of kids who took their own lives back in the 50s. Apparently these wandering spirits seek out other potential suicides and try to convince them that killing themselves is a bad way to go. And considering the way these losers dress, I’d be inclined to agree with them. Nothing works as a better deterrent to suicide than the knowledge that you will spend the rest of eternity wearing pleated skirts, hair ribbons ties and varsity sweaters. Sally decides that even though her biological clock needs to be reset for daylight savings time, it may still be worth it to give life another shot. She doesn’t kill herself, and the satisfied ghosts disappear. Oh yeah…this is supposed to be about Alex isn’t it. In all the excitement, I had completely forgotten. Ready for some time honored scoobyness? Read on. SPOILER WARNING: From here on out, some pretty important shit will be revealed. Since all the motel guests (except Sally) are actually ghosts, we learn that Alex has netted maybe 30 bucks for the entire night. Which is roughly 9,970 dollars shy of the 10 grand he needs to pay out to Tom Fuller in a few hours. To make matters worse, he sees a haunting image in the window of the house belonging to the late Mrs. Bates. He races up the stairs only to be terrorized by a skeletal zombie wearing a widow’s veil and wielding a knife! Pretty fucking cool, eh? Alex is too terrified to move. But just as the ghost of Mrs. Bates is ready to sink a kitchen knife into Alex’s empty skull, in rushes Henry Watson, the Handyman From Hell! Henry tackles grandma into the corner and begins wrestling around with her. In the ultimate Scooby-Doo climax, he pulls the skull mask off of her revealing the face of TOM FULLER; the evil banker! Tom has been playing up the Mrs. Bates myth in an effort to scare Alex into selling the valuable Bates property to the bank. That way, Tom could net his own client who would promise to develop a multi-billion dollar franchise on the land. But Tom is being fairly tight-lipped about the whole affair. After all, whose story are the police more likely to believe: That of a respected banker with contacts all across the state; Or the stuttering mama’s boy who whacks off to pictures of Betty Boop? But then, from out of the shadows, the dark skeletal form of the REAL Mrs. Bates enters the room. She attacks Tom and forces him to confess to terrorizing wimpy little Alex. We soon learn that the second Mrs. Bates is actually Willie who has been carrying a carefully concealed mini-recorder inside her costume. Tom is forced to give Alex a reasonable payment schedule for his loan. Everything after that is hunky-dory, and the Bates Motel is now officially open for business. Acting/Dialogue: Bud Cort plays the part of Alex West, and he’s pretty bloody awful. I don’t blame Bud though. It seems like he was handed a shitty script and was told to just stutter and fidget a lot. I’m pretty sure this is not the type of role he really wants to see highlighted on his resume. In fact, I’m equally certain that this bomb is part of the reason why he was passed over for the lead in Titanic. Lori Petty plays the part of Willie. This was her first real acting gig and this is pretty much as good as it gets. She plays the same character in every film she’s in. Some of you may recall her as the bratty surfer chick that boffs Keanu Reeves in Point Break. She also lit the charts in the four-star masterpiece known as Tank Girl. Lori’s roles involve cracking off smarmy remarks, bitching up a whirlwind and sputtering through that obnoxiously fake Brooklyn accent. But there are still a few small casting pleasures to be found here. If you are a sweaty overweight Star Trek nerd like me, then you will juice your Underoos when you discover that Alex’s shrink Dr. Goodman is played by none other than Robert Picardo. Picardo is more widely known for his portrayal of the Emergency Medical Hologram on Star Trek: Voyager. But to horror enthusiasts, he is affectionately recognized as the hairy badass antagonist Eddie Quist from The Howling. There is also a guest appearance by Jason Bateman as Tony Scotti. Now most of you younger fans probably don’t remember who Jason Bateman is, but for about 23 minutes in 1987 he was considered a heartthrob teen idol. He bounced around between guest appearances on Silver Spoons, to a short lived sit-com called It’s Your Move, to a more regular schedule on the Hogan Family and even big screen exploits like the heart-stomping terror fest known as Teen Wolf Too. And he’s not the only shining star in the Bateman family. His sister Justine was a prominent feature on the Michael J Fox sit-com Family Ties (She played Michael’s sister Mallory Keaton). Strangely enough, the careers of both Bateman siblings seem to have languished into obscurity like a forgotten turd in an Arizona outhouse. Don’t believe me? Check out their track records on IMDB. Here’s Jason’s. And here’s Justine’s. Honestly, have any of you heard of ANY of these TV melodramas that they’ve starred in? But I guess I shouldn’t judge them too harshly. There’s a bright future in After-school specials after all. Gore: Cleans fingernails. Whistles a jaunty tune. Nothing to see here. Move along. Move along. Guilty Pleasures: Partial shot of Alex taking a shower. Ewwwww. I’d rather see bony old Mrs. Bates running around with her saggy tits flopping about than have my imagination tormented by visions of a naked Alex West. Beyond that, there isn’t shit. This was a made for TV movie-pilot that aired on NBC, July 5th 1987. The Good: This is the section where I attempt to capitalize on a film’s inherent strengths and overall merit. In many ways I find it to be not only the most challenging of ventures, but oftentimes the most rewarding as well. After going through great pains to analyze the Bates Motel with a fine-toothed edge trimmer, I think I can offer forth a fair verdict of the movie’s more superlative aspects. My first step in attempting this was a careful screening of the movie’s opening credits. After which, I skipped forward to the end and scrolled through the entirety of the closing credits. And just to be doubly sure, I even went on to the Bates Motel listing on IMDB to scrutinize the affair even more closely. The results are thus: Ben Affleck has absolutely no involvement in either the filming, production or distribution of the Bates Motel! Now I know what you’re thinking. You are probably throwing your hands up in dismay while pushing yourself away from the keyboard exclaiming, “No Headhunter! ‘Tis impossible! Say it isn’t so!” But alas, it is. After a seizure-inducing amount of scrutiny and research analysis, I can say with all honesty that you will not find even an iota of Ben Affleck’s mega-star influence attached to this picture. And the world owes Ben a dept of gratitude because of it. These are the times when I like to take a breather from my workload, step away from the console, strap on my tennis shoes and walk out onto the back porch. I take a deep breath of the fresh summer air, the smell of Woolite dancing upon the breeze and stare out over the horizon as sparrows fly wistfully by. My mouth stretches into a self-assured smile of contentment and as I look up admiring the beauty of the vista before me, I close my eyes and say, “Thanks Ben.” The Bad: As anyone who regularly visits this sight can attest, I ardently strive to conduct my reviews free of generalization and with a keen eye towards possibly offending the capabilities or lifestyles of those individuals who belong to minority counter-cultures or social groups. I am very conscious of the plights of those who may not enjoy the same fortunes that life has heaped upon me. But at the same time, I have likewise pledged to conduct myself with honesty and integrity, so at the risk of inadvertently insulting an entire culture or class of people, I am forced to project my opinion in the most sincere manner capable. That being said; this movie is gay. There, I said it. This movie is GAY and I make no apologies. I’m sure that even as this page is being loaded onto the Yahoo server, hundreds of people representing the Gay and Lesbian Drunken Biker Association are flooding my inbox with hate mail, with one hand tapping furiously on the keyboard while the other is fondling the chartreuse colored cell phone dialing up a rich Manhattan Jew lawyer who is probably receiving kickbacks from the ACLU just so he can cover his alimony and child support payments to his alcoholic ex-wife while she spends the day pumping out more kids fathered by Guido the killer pimp just to get the extra tax cuts on her 1040. Fuckers. Now when I say this movie is gay, I don’t mean just average run-of-the-mill normal gay. I mean rosy rouge Rainbow Brite Spongebob Squarepants gay. And this probably stems from the fact that there is not a single character in this flick that I can seriously get behind. Alex West has all the charisma of a eunuch. I’ve already gone on my rant about how stupid he is, and what’s more; he seems to be rewarded for being a dipshit! Here’s a guy who kills his pop at age 6, spends 27 years in a straight jacket, gets out and manages to procure his own business AND gets the girl. Fuck that! He’s a spineless little weenie and I have no sympathy for him. But that’s not what really pisses me off about this movie. What really sends me into a tizzy is the unabashed way that director Richard Rothstein completely ignores the sequels to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho! Psycho II and Psycho III have no place in Rothstein’s hackneyed little universe. Instead, he would rather kill off the great Norman Bates and replace him with wimpy little Alex West. Alex isn’t even fit to lick the spirit gum off of Norman’s mama-wig. What really pisses me off about this is that Rothstein effectively hamstrings any potential growth by killing off Bates’ character. He’s more or less saying that the sequels are complete shit and that only HIS vision is the one worth paying attention to. Thankfully, this less-than-stellar project was quickly forgotten about and pretty much buried in the dirt next to Jake Bates with the broadcast of Psycho IV: The Beginning. I also think the framing of this film is pretty awful. I recall watching it when it was originally broadcast back in ’87. I really didn’t think much of it then, and my opinion of it has only gotten worse. From out of nowhere, we steer away from Alex’s story and begin advertising some suicide prevention public service announcement. Now as I’m watching this I’m thinking, “What the fuck is all this shit?” And then I began to suspect that this was intended to be some type of television pilot; A sort of “Tales From The Truck Stop” kind of thing. A small amount of research bore out my hypothesis. The Bates Motel was indeed designed to be an ongoing television series; a sort of Fantasy Island for the Insane if you will. Each week Alex West would intro the show and then we would get to watch various motel guests deal with strange and macabre issues that would creep up from time to time. Yes, this was Richard Rothstein’s vision. Holy Shit! I just realized how much time I spent writing this fucking review! These movie-making fucks ought to be paying me money just for reminding the general public that this turd was ever even made. They get the last laugh, and all I get is carpal tunnel. Christ, I’m a loser. I need help. Seriously. Or maybe I just need to get laid. Anyone wanna lick my balls? Great Lines: “This guy just wants to build his own monument with your money!” – Willie convincing Alex not to accept the architect’s ideas (I’m probably mis-quoting Willie’s line, but I don’t really give a shit). Overall Rating: 4 out of 10 severed heads. |
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