The Classics Shelf: Anthony Perkins - Part Five

For more in this series:

Part One – Introduction: Anthony Perkins
Part Two – The Fifties: Teen Idol
Part Three – The Sixties: Continential Gentleman
Part Four – The Seventies: Character Actor

THE LAST DECADE: RECLAIMING THE PAST

Anthony Perkins received good reviews for his performances in Winter Kills and the Canadian thriller Deadly Companion, but the possibility of reclaiming stardom was seeming more and more remote as he passed the age of fifty. He shot a sitcom pilot, The Ghost Writer, but it did not sell. The years of complicated self-image and the wear and tear of an increasingly erratic career were resulting in negative stories from the sets of his films. Tab Hunter tried to convince him to star with him in Lust in the Dust but Perkins refused, which Hunter says was the last time they saw each other. Rod Steiger claims that he and Perkins hated each other on The Glory Boys because Steiger had a bigger trailer, and Meg Tilly says that Perkins never approved of her casting in Psycho II and was never shy about expressing it to all who would listen.

The 1980s arrived and horror had morphed from underground to mainstream exploitation: studios were making very popular by-the-numbers slasher films on minuscule budgets, which made it the perfect time to bring back the slasher that had started it all. The shadow of Norman Bates was now so large that Perkins decided to succumb to it, filming three sequels to the Hitchcock film in a decade dominated by his appearances in horror movies, more or less his only major leads in studio films before he learned of his illness. During his fourth go-around as Bates in the made-for-cable Psycho IV: The Beginning (a surprisingly good sequel, it should be added), Perkins was diagnosed as HIV positive. His final film, a television movie called In the Dark Woods, was the last of many roles that worked off his persona in an ironic light, using his threatening persona as Bates as a red herring, a tragically weak conclusion to an incredible career.

Perkins died on September 12, 1992, at the age of 60. One wonders what direction his career would have taken had he not been felled by the devastation of the AIDS epidemic. Some sources list The Silence of the Lambs as a project he had hoped to star in himself, an attempt at a career comeback that was given to another Anthony not long before his death. I sometimes wonder if the age of prestige television would have provided new opportunities for him to show his range, or if it would have just been another chance to toil in the shadow of Norman Bates. His was a great talent, and a great career, but there’s no doubt that his range was underappreciated and never given enough opportunity to shine.

Perkins has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: one for movies and one for television.

North Sea Hijack **(aka Ffolkes)**

Andrew V. McLaglen, 1980

Actors cast as James Bond are often hard-pressed to find work outside the spy genre, so it’s not that surprising that Roger Moore settles for a job that also involves his saving the world from annihilation during his tenure as 007. That the film works as hard as it does to make his character as much the opposite of Bond as possible results in its coming across as somewhat campy, an underwater expert with a very meagre sense of humour and a hatred of women (equalled by his love of cats) who performs deadly actions that are never accompanied by a raised eyebrow. Rufus Excalibur Ffolkes (the same just sounds like a virgin, doesn’t it) is brought in by the government to help when a group of terrorists, led by Perkins, take over a sailing vessel in the North Sea, promising to blow up a massive oil rig and sink the British economy if they are not handed the Doctor Evil-worthy sum of twenty-five million dollars. It’s a film that seems to be made on, if not a small budget, a constrained one for an adventure of its kind, but it twists the tension enough to be very involving and leads to a wonderfully satisfying conclusion.

Deadly Companion (aka Double Negative)

George Bloomfield, 1980

The YouTube upload is the only version of this film I could find, which is unfortunate, as the image quality is very low and the film’s visual elements are among its strongest assets. It’s a Canadian production starring Michael Sarrazin as a traumatized foreign correspondent who survived torture in the Middle East only to come home and discover that his wife has been viciously raped and murdered. He was at her house the night it happened but has no memory of it, trying to get answers out of his girlfriend (Susan Clark) but finding that she wants to forget the matter. At the same time, he is hounded by a mysterious, threatening stranger (Perkins) who has connections to Clark. There are numerous elements of this film that make it well worth watching, most delightful of which is the appearances of SCTV cast members in early film roles, including Catherine O’Hara (spelled Katherine in the credits), Eugene Levy, John Candy, and Dave Thomas, as well as Canadian legends Michael Ironside and Kenneth Welsh. There’s also the opportunity to see Toronto in the early eighties before architectural changes of the following decades, but the plot is hollow and the film has more atmosphere and attitude than throughline. How it gets from one point to the next very rarely involves much logic, but Perkins is terrific, in yet another role capitalizing on his potential threat as Norman Bates, one that gives him a few choice moments before his eventual fate.

Psycho II

Richard Franklin, 1983

It’s been twenty-two years since Marion Crane checked into the Bates Motel and changed everyone’s feelings about showers for the rest of the century. (A friend of mine told me her mother switched her planned purchase of a colourful shower curtain to a clear one the day after she saw the original.) Norman Bates has been declared rehabilitated and ready to go home, but Lila Crane (Vera Miles, returning to the role) speaks up in defense of his victims and demands that authorities think further of this plan. Norman’s lawyer (Robert Loggia) prevails, and our slender hero gets to return to the most famous stop on the Universal Studios tour, finding his motel turned into a by-the-hour rat-trap by the current manager (Dennis Franz), and his house in not much better condition. Almost immediately, Norman is beset by disturbing visions, once again seeing his mother in the window and finding things being moved around when he’s not looking. His new friend and roommate, played by Meg Tilly, insists that all is well, but Norman believes that he’s slipping back into madness and isn’t encouraged when bodies start piling up in the basement. The popularity of slashers in the 1980s meant that it only stood to reason that the film that started it all would be revisited in a soulless cash grab of a sequel, but even with that in mind, it’s hard to forgive this film’s failures. No one expects the level of style that Hitchcock brought to his work from Franklin (who previously made Road Games), but given that he tries to put an emphasis on character and save the blood-soaked mayhem for the final act, something far more interesting should have resulted than the plodding script and direction we have here. Perkins takes the character to a level of self-awareness that would naturally result from two decades of therapy, but it’s not as commanding as his twitchy and brittle work in the original. Tilly is miscast in the lead and her unhappy working experience with both star and director (who basically punished her for their own mistake) shows in a performance that gets easily pushed off the screen.

The Sins of Dorian Gray

Tony Maylam, 1983

An odd entry in the filmography of the Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin team, best known for animated films like The Last Unicorn and The Hobbit, this television film shot in Toronto puts a “modern” twist on a classic tale. Oscar Wilde’s once hotly controversial, homoerotic novel has its titular character turned into a woman, a model whose career lasts for decades without the slightest blemish in her perfect, porcelain beauty. Hidden in her gorgeous apartment is the reason, the film footage from a screen test that once showed her at her youthful peak but, as time passes and her sins accumulate, sees her growing more decrepit on screen. That the filmmakers try to make the tale more in line with the aesthetic tastes of the super funky 1980s isn’t a crime, but this is an empty and mind-numbingly boring adaptation, one example being the interpretation of the Sibyl Vane character. Once a trampy actress in Wilde’s tale, drawing our dubious hero into a seedy underworld, Vane is now a male piano bar performer named Stuart (Joseph Bottoms) who tries to get on American Bandstand but fails because of his own insecurity; it’s hardly the level of sublimated guilt from the original story (and they should have made him a soap actor or stripper, and played by Gregory Harrison). Perkins doesn’t set a foot wrong as “Henry Lord” (renamed from Lord Henry), the showbiz Svengali who takes Dorian away from an aborted film career and makes her the eternally famous face in the modelling world. Despite bad dialogue and vacant direction, he still manages to prove himself adept at keeping things together on camera, and doesn’t embarrass himself in what is otherwise a highly forgettable effort.

Crimes of Passion

Ken Russell, 1984

Perkins being forced to get work in roles that riffed on his Norman Bates fame practically shows on his face in this underwhelming thriller. A woman turning to sex work to deal with a failed marriage is something that can only happen in the movies, but since Russell’s imagination is also only possible in the movies, he’s an appropriate fit for Barry Sandler’s outrageous screenplay. John Laughlin plays a family man who takes a second job doing surveillance for the owner of a clothing company because he needs the cash, asked to follow an employee that the boss thinks is selling secrets to his competitor. What Laughlin finds instead is that Joanna Crane (Kathleen Turner) turns into “China Blue” at night, and he quickly becomes sexually obsessed with her, which puts the final nail in the coffin of his sexless marriage to Annie Potts. The plot begins as something daring and provocative, even for an eighties movie this one pushes the limits of what you’d expect to see (including Turner sodomizing a john with a police stick). Things get messy in the final third when it’s clear that neither Russell nor Sandler thought their provocations through, vacillating between a boring struggle that Laughlin has with his feelings about Madonna/Whore fantasies and Turner’s being subject to the obsessive attention of a religious zealot (Perkins) wielding a very sharp dildo. In truth, this lurid tale of a fashion executive who moonlights as a streetwalker is not really an exploration of a woman’s dual sexual identity, it’s an obsessive and inconclusive look at male sexual hypocrisy, but the tacked on ending means that it fails to do so in a way that could be interesting or effective.

Psycho III

Anthony Perkins, 1986

Perkins found himself revisiting the character that made him immortal because it got him in front of the cameras with studio support. This time, he takes over as director since he knows the Psycho franchise better than anyone. Taking place not long after the previous film, it begins with a novitiate at a convent (the marvellous Diana Scarwid) being tortured by her doubts about god’s existence and making a suicide attempt that goes horribly wrong. She leaves the sisters and hits the road, narrowly escaping being assaulted by a baby-blue-eyed aspiring musician who gives her a ride (Jeff Fahey) before arriving at the Bates Motel, where she discovers that Fahey has taken up a job as the day manager. Norman develops an affinity for the young lady that could turn into his first successful relationship with a woman, but there are two major obstacles: she looks a lot like the lady who checked in to the motel all those years ago, and there’s still a Mommie Dearest on the second floor who thinks all the woman he encounters are out to corrupt him. The film is mostly an excuse for more sharp knives to enter nubile female bodies, but it does move at a more exciting pace than Psycho II and has a few moments of genuinely scary fun. A rushed ending, however, undoes the experience and reveals it to be little more than a cheap sequel made simply for the profits, of which there were less than the last time.

Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films “Saturn” Nomination: Best Actor

Destroyer

Robert Kirk, 1988

Appearing in a Netflix original might seem like a low point for a star to hit these days, but in the eighties it was far more humbling to go from stardom to appearing in straight-to-video genre films. Such was the case with Perkins’ appearance in a supporting role in this utterly forgettable horror film, which he took after Roddy McDowell dropped out. He plays a film director helming his own chiller in a prison that has been empty since a riot closed it down two years earlier. The violence that closed the place was initiated by a giant, musclebound multiple murderer on death row (Lyle Alzado), an event that has been invading the dreams of a stunt double (Deborah Foreman of My Chauffeur fame) who is dating the movie’s happy-go-lucky screenwriter (Clayton Rohner). When it turns out that the bad guy didn’t die in the riot and has actually been hiding in the prison’s complex (and, what, ordering pizza to stay alive?), the tantrums of the lead actress (Lannie Garrett) turn out not to be the scariest issue for the crew to deal with. It would be a fun grindhouse indulgence if it didn’t look so cheap and wasn’t photographed so poorly, and it doesn’t help that Alzado, who fits the bill physically, isn’t scary or charismatic in the lead.

Lucky Stiff (aka Mr. Christmas Dinner)

Anthony Perkins, 1988

Psycho III led to a second opportunity for Perkins to sit in the director’s chair, which would end up being his final time doing so, and there’s no overstating what a shame that is. A poorly gauged, amateurish comedy that tries to blend elements of horror without deciding on its tone, it stars Joe Alaskey as a s lovelorn loser who is repeatedly abandoned at the altar. After his latest engagement breaks up, he decides to enjoy the honeymoon he had booked on his own, heading to a ski resort where a gorgeous blonde (Donna Dixon) falls hard for him despite having a handsome suitor (played by actor turned occult philosopher Leigh McCloskey) pursuing her. What our hero doesn’t know is that she is a member of a mountain family who sit down to dinner every Christmas and feast upon a human being. His plush body is what she has decided will be perfect to feed the entire extended clan. He follows her back to her homestead to enjoy the holidays but soon begins to suspect that his lady love’s brother (Jeff Kober) is getting a little too friendly with the sharp objects, and makes plans to run away with Dixon’s sister-in-law (Barbara Howard). Written, badly, by Naked Gun and Scary Movie scribe Pat Proft, the film likely meant to be a sweet indulgence in SNL-style humour, but with actors all working at various levels of dedication and some of the ugliest and cheapest production design you’ve ever seen, it’s a true eyesore.

Edge of Sanity

Gérard Kikoïne, 1989

The careers of stars of the studio system usually dwindled down to guest appearances on nighttime soap operas and variety shows, so when shoring up the state of Perkins’ work at the end of his life, it’s important to note that he was still getting lead roles despite the fact that they were often in movies like this one. Pairing up his penchant for the macabre with a classic, oft-told horror tale, he stars as Jekyll and Hyde in an awful adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson story, one that, as many before it have done, combines the classic novel with the lore of Jack the Ripper. In this version, Jekyll is a happily married surgeon who is developing a substance (which looks like cocaine) that accidentally turns him into a sadistic, sex-crazed serial killer (with some very hardworking eyeliner). He spends his nights hunting down London’s sex workers, who all dress like they’re in a Madonna video, while his wife, who volunteers at a women’s hospital, begins to close in on the reason that so many of the girls she treats are disappearing. It’s hard to decide if the film’s anachronistic look, somewhere between the funky eighties and the less funky Victorian period, is the result of an intentional blend of styles or just laziness, but it doesn’t matter, as the very bad direction makes it impossible to sit through. Perkins devotes himself to both characterizations, impressively astute as the gentleman and unhinged as the madman, but with such a cheap production housing his efforts, the result is forgettable.

Psycho IV: The Beginning

Mick Garris, 1990

The fourth Norman Bates film is a thrilling return to the story and, for many, including Perkins himself, the best of the sequels. It’s also an unhappy reminder of where his career had found itself by the end of his shortened life. He was once again forced to make a Psycho sequel in order to find himself in a lead role. The film was passed over for theatrical distribution and premiered on Showtime, and it was during shooting that Perkins received the HIV diagnosis that would signal his eventual demise two years later. Without knowledge of such factors, however, watching this one is a treat: it begins with a preposterous framing narrative, in which Norman calls into a true-crime radio show (hosted by the fabulous CCH Pounder) and announces that he’s a former mass murderer who is walking the straight and narrow with the wife he met in the psych ward (sure, okay) but who is ready to kill again. The missus is pregnant and Norman believes his issues are genetic, and has decided that the right thing to do would be to kill his wife (played by Donna Mitchell) before she lets the spawn of Satan into the world. To bolster his argument, he flashes back to his childhood when, as a teenager played by Henry Thomas, he dealt with an overbearing and sexually uncontained mother (played in a fantastic performance by Olivia Hussey) who leaves no doubt in our minds that she is responsible for the patterns of behaviour to follow. Screenwriter Joseph Stefano returns to the series and does his best to erase the films between the 1960 original and this juicy thriller. While he still doesn’t come anywhere near the class and panache of the first film (and nobody should ever expect that), he does deliver on juicy kills as well as character development. The result is, with only a few exceptions, a very smooth ride.

Daughter of Darkness

Stuart Gordon, 1990

A horror film about vampires set in Romania but not about Dracula, the story involves bloodsucking through a very gross forked tongue and made for television: the eighties were a wild time. Perkins was paid a hefty sum to spend four weeks in Budapest (subbing for Bucharest) on this ridiculous project, in which Mia Sara does her best to look like she’s taking the plot seriously. She plays a young woman who has crossed the Iron Curtain in search of a father she never met, as her mother left the country before she was born. She tries to find him while dealing with some very disturbing nightmares (which are the film’s best moments). She enlists the help of a chatty cab driver, is romanced by a handsome stranger that she meets at an elegant restaurant and, in the film’s worst attempt at plot density, has a will-they-won’t-they that we really hope they won’t with a temperamental American embassy employee (Jack Coleman). She also, unfortunately, finds herself pulled into an underworld of what turn out to be dangerous monsters before coming to the dark truth about her real parentage (you get one guess). And she keeps finding herself in life-threatening situations that she needs men to save her from. The chance to see an Eastern European city in the eighties is a good reason to watch this film, and a few moments provide chills. However, Perkins gives one of his goofiest performances and, in trying to be both an effective horror film but also network-friendly. The film keeps changing its tone and its awkwardness is exhausting by the end.

A Demon in My View

Peter Haffter, 1991

Perkins’ last lead role in a feature film is as a psycho killer with mommy issues, and confirms my fear that he never managed to escape Norman Bates by his untimely passing. Decades after the unsolved murders of the “Kenbourne Killer,” a strangler who targeted the sex workers walks the town’s dark streets and lives a quiet life in a rooming house. He’s a single man named Arthur Johnson (Perkins) who oversees the activities of his neighbours while resuming his murderous affairs late at night on the streets, which are surprisingly empty. A young man who moves into their rooming house is romantically entangled with a woman who is engaged to someone else. Said tenant also bears a similar name, Anthony Johnson (Uwe Bohm), which means that Arthur starts getting his letters and starts interfering with his love life. The script is based on a Ruth Rendell novel, which is apparent in the accumulation of character quirks that are tied to dark habits, plus the very literary conceit of the doubling of the name, a situation that leads to an ultimately ironic conclusion. What should read as incisive psychological investigation is actually magnificently boring on screen. Most of the supporting characters feel like excuses to kill time between Perkins’ most noteworthy moments, whether it’s dressing a mannequin up as his mother or going after more women to satisfy his lust for blood. The lackluster direction by Haffter and dull script kill any energy that could possibly be generated by the performances. Perkins rarely looks like he even cares about this latest exploitation of his by now exhausted screen persona.

In the Deep Woods

Charles Correll, 1992

Perkins’ appearance in this TV movie, which he shot after learning of his HIV diagnosis, would end up being his last turn on screen. To no one’s surprise, it’s yet another film that trades on the Norman Bates myth by using his presence as a bait and switch, a tale of a serial killer who is hunting down a number of women who, in most cases, seem to be connected to an author of children’s books (Rosanna Arquette). Our heroine’s love life improves (with D.W. Moffett) at just about the time that her best friend is murdered. Things are only made that much more intense with the appearance of a morally dubious private detective (Perkins) who insists that Arquette has information that could help unveil the identity of the killer. Amy Ryan appears in her film debut in what is a forgettable, rather formulaic thriller, one whose cast doesn’t phone anything in but whose pedestrian direction fails to make much of an impression.