Psycho I & Zodiac

Note:

         In the last blog I said Psycho Made $350,000 for Alfred Hitchcock. I should have said Psycho I made $350,000,000 for Alfred. (That's three hundred and fifty million dollars profit for Psycho I alone.) Not bad !! I don't know what the following three movies made.

Note:

         It's about time we started talking a little about Zodiac or I will begin to lose some of my    obsessive-compulsive nature. All this time I've been having conversations with my friend Ricardo Gomez, mk-zodiac.com in San Francisco. When I bring up a point about who the zodiac is he always helps me by giving me info which enlarges my perspective. Ricardo is an extremely intelligent sleuth.

         I don't want to sound like a broken record but there seems to be a connection between a few of the people in the two disc collectors edition of the zodiac and the zodiac himself. I agree with George Bawart, the Vallejo detective, most of the time. He is very good in his thinking. There seems to be a strong connection between Don C----y and the zodiac. It almost seems that maybe Arthur Leigh Allen was being set up by Don. Every time Allen mentioned something that he was doing, Don would cover himself by identifying with the same action. For instance licking the stamps on the thank you letters Allen was sending out. Also leaving a large thumb print on Allen's ball of wax that Allen had in his trailer. It almost seems that the two of them were working as a team.

         Also, the remark that Darlene F. made to Mike Mageau at Blue Rock Springs when the car pulled up behind them. She called the man Rick, according to Mike. Mike said the Zodiac's first name was Rick. How much more do we need? Both of these leads can't be right. Mike got a good look at the Zodiac - only three feet away.

         We seem to be going in circular patterns of thinking but the one "ace in the hole" we have is the brain fluid of Arthur Leigh Allen. But this only works for him. I think the Vallejo Police Dept. has more information than we know.

Psycho IV

         Dying by strychnine is a slow and painful death.

         Norman said his wife tricked him by going off the pill so they could have a baby. This made Norman so very mad that he had it in his mind to kill her. He said meet me at the motel which by then was very run down. She met him there and he had the knife in his hand but couldn't hurt her. He then told her to get out of the house and then he set the house on fire finally they meet outside as the house is burning and he says the past is going up in flames.

         This is the end of Psycho  IV. As the credits roll  up you can hear the sound of a baby crying in the distance.

         Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) was knighted before he died and was awarded the American Film Industry's Award. He never lived long enough to see Psycho II, III, & IV.

         Janet Leigh died circa 2010.

         Anthony Perkins died in 1992 when he was about 60 years old.

         Vera Miles is still alive I believe.

         Psycho spanned the years (1960 - 1990). It made Hitchcock a very rich man grossing in around $350,000 for him thus passing any of his other movies.

Psycho IV

         A few minutes later Chet Rudolph stumbles into the bedroom vomiting as he walks in. He says, "He poisoned us Norma." Norma says, "You little bastard. Kill him Chet." Norman was watching from the hallway as the strychnine began to take effect. Chet Rudolph collapses while Norma staggers after Norman taking swipes at him as she goes down the stairway. She continues to try to reach him but the poison has been too strong for her. Chet tackles Norman at the bottom of the stairs but Norman gets away and then finally Norma collapses in the downstairs hall. Norman takes her down to the fruit cellar where she dies. Chet dies too.

         After Norman stole her corpse the movie shows him making incisions in her stomach much like you would gut a deer. Norman treated her with chemicals to preserve her much like his stuffed birds. Then Norman sews her up and she is then preserved for "all time". This was Norman's way of keeping his mother with him for a long, long time. It seems as though this demented way of keeping his mother this way has a bit of masochism in it.

Psycho IV

         Suddenly Norman comes down dressed in a wig and old dark dress with a lace collar. (This is one of his mother's dresses.) He then begins to choke her to death. He puts her body in the trunk of the Buick Roadmaster having choked her twice, and then starts to push the car into the swamp out back. The car's tail lights are on as it rolls into the swamp with the woman pounding inside. The pounding eventually stops.

         The weather is warm and humid and Chet and Norma are upstairs in her bedroom. Chet has just finished taking a shower as they wait for "room service" from Norman.

         Down in the kitchen Norman is preparing a pitcher of ice water and vanilla for the couple upstairs when Norman reaches for the bottle of strychnine in the cabinet. It says on the bottle for Mr. John Bates to take 0.5 mg as a stimulate. This is a very small dose. One half of one thousandth of a gram. Strychnine used to be used to stimulate the system I think but I'm not absolutely sure of this. There may have been other uses of the drug. Strychnine came in about the consistency of mineral oil. Norman dumped the whole bottle in the pitcher of ice water. He then took the liquid upstairs to the waiting couple. Chet says, "Room service has arrived." Chet Rudolph drinks his glass right away while Norma plays with it and then drinks her glass.

         It's not too long before the drug hits Chet first.

Psycho IV

         Along about this time the people in the studio get into a fight. Fran, the hostess, wants to try her method of talking to Norman while the psychiatrist still wants to use his method. The psychiatrist finally leaves the program and everything calms down.

         One night Norman's mother comes home with a man named Chet Rudolph, a bartender. Norman watches from his mother's bedroom window while they go into a motel room and proceed to make love. The next morning when Norman comes down to the kitchen his mother asks him if he saw them go into a motel room because she saw Norman looking down at them from the house. Norman says "Since when did you start hanging around cheap bars?" This makes his mother angry and about then Chet comes down from the upstairs bedroom. Norman's mother says "You two say hello to each other." Norman tells Chet to take his father's robe off. Norman leaves for school.

         Chet thinks it's time for Norman to have some boxing lessons so he gets two pair of boxing gloves and they go down the stone stairs to a grassy spot and put the gloves on. Chet tries to get Norman to throw a punch and ends up hitting Norman lightly. Chet gets more and more angry at Norman for being so passive and tells him to throw one of his punches to get even. Chet finally pops Norman in the jaw and knocks him out. Norma comes by and just shakes her head. Norman is bleeding at the corner of the mouth slightly and that's the end of the boxing lesson.

         The scene changes to night-time and Norman has an older woman in a '49 green Buick Roadmaster and they're necking when suddenly Norman says he has to go up to the house to give his mother her medicine. It's probably the mother half of Norman's brain that is making him do this.             (to be continued)

Psycho IV

Note:  It should be noted that when Psycho I was made in 1960 there was a relationship between Norman and his mother that was more than mother and son. I believe that I may have mentioned this in the earlier blog. 1960 couldn't take this so the lines that referred to this were removed. Steven Ribello mentions this in his narration of Psycho in the collectors edition DVD.

         On hot and humid days Norman's mother would have Norman blot her body with orange blossom liquid starting at her feet and working up. In the movie when he got above her knees she started to giggle and they both fell off the bed onto the floor and started rolling around and laughing as they tumbled around. She felt him getting aroused and "pretended" to be very angry, smearing his face with lipstick, making fun of his maleness, putting a dress on him and locking him in a closet for a while. This emasculation seemed to be almost enjoyable to him and her. It almost seemed as they were acting out parts in a play. I was surprised that they allowed this carrying-on to be part of the movie. This seemed to have a reflection on the script writer/s almost as if they were drawing on their own experiences.

         Once, at the bottom of the stairs leading to the mansion, Norman was beating a rug when his mother came down and started hitting him with a newspaper. He asked why, and she responded, "Who else can I hit?" The paper mentioned that they were building a new main highway which would divert traffic away from their motel and thus ruin their business. This turned out to be only half true as time went on.

         About then Norman got a visit from Mrs. Lane, a next-door neighbor saying his line was busy, busy, busy.

Psycho IV

         Norma Bates was always afraid of lighting storms and would ask Norman to strip down to his briefs and crawl into bed and hold her until the storm was over. In the movie Norman is aroused and gets up and runs into his room. His mother follows him and while he is there she sees a magazine for female bras and slips in his magazine pile. She immediately tells him to take it to the garbage outside while it is raining hard. She follows him with a raincoat and tells him that she will wish that she'd been harder on him in his youth. When all of this started I began to think of incest between Norman and his mother.

         Meanwhile Norman talks to his wife on the phone and she says she forgot his birthday cake and Norman says he could make one just as easy but he's not too good at icing. They talk and she decides to pick it up later.

         One day Norman got home from school early and saw his mother going into cabin #1 of the motel. He peeped through one of the holes that his father had made and watched his mother. She was tearing the room apart and losing her mind. She was tearing the sheets from the beds and throwing them around and smashing other things. This seems to help validate the fact that she was  schizophrenic. There doesn't seem to be any cure for this mental illness. Only the fact that it can be controlled with drugs.

                                                    

Psycho IV

         Note: The voice of the older Mrs. Bates was played by Alice Hirson.

Psycho IV

         One of the first killing encounters that Norman had as a young man was with a young girl who had amorous intentions. She pulls up in a '41 or '46 Ford coupe, a car that would bring a high price to auto fans today, and asks if he wants to go and look at the fireworks in the park. He says no and that he can't because he has to watch the motel and his mother. This would have been his original mother, the one he poisoned with strychnine. A customer says he has a plugged up drain and while he goes to cabin #6 to fix it his girl-friend sneaks up to the mansion on the hill. When he comes back he can't find her so he also goes up to the house and finds her there. He suggests they go into his bedroom and she begins to disrobe. In the middle of that the mother part of his mind kicks in and he thinks he hears the mother and excuses himself. While he disappears she gets up, puts on a bathrobe and goes into the mother's bedroom and pokes the mother's feet. She doesn't know it but Norman has put on a wig and dress and is carrying a butcher knife. He comes out of the shadows and attacks his girl and stabs her to death. This is the mother part of his demented mind that makes him do this and I think this is the first killing in the list of many.
        
         The conversation between Fran Ambrose and Norman goes on and on and he mentions the fact that he stuffed her after robbing the grave of her body and weighing down the coffin with books to make up for her body. He also mentions the fact that he carried on conversations with her corpse but he couldn't make her voice sound as sweet as it did when she was alive. Norman would dress up in her clothes and talk to himself in her voice and answer in his own. This went on for many years. He was never all Norman but often only mother. The mother half was the dominant half of his split mind.

         When Norman was 5 or 6 his father died. The DVD says he was stung to death by bees. This doesn't scam with Psycho III which said Norman's father was killed by Miss Spool. The disc shows Norman and his mother sitting in the funeral parlor with a handkerchief over the father's face to cover up the spots stung by the bees. Norman giggles after his mother tickles him and she slaps him for his giggling. She did this on purpose. .......to be continued.