Reception
The film received mixed reviews when first broadcast on Showtime. Henry Stewart of L Magazine said: "Garris evinces high-grade professionalism, but his comic-book approximations of real emotions—like desire, madness and murderlust—feel empty. Hitchcock this most certainly ain’t." Ninja Dixon.com stated: "This is a good tv movie, way better than its reputation, and continues the tradition of great acting in the series." Cult Reviews.com said: "The film is shot well, the fire sequence, by Rodney Charters, is particularly stunning. The only real trouble with this film is the bad writing, which, considering that it was the baby of the scriptwriter of the original, Joseph Stefano, is very disappointing indeed." Matt Poirier of Direct to Video Connoisseur.com stated: "This was a pretty unmemorable movie. It tried to make references to the original, like one where Perkins cuts his thumb, and the blood going into the drain mimics the blood in the famous shower scene. Way too obvious and pretty obnoxious." Despite some negative reviews, the film received high Nielsen ratings with around 10 million viewers watching the premiere. 2 years after the film was released, it was nominated for a Saturn award for Best Genre Television Series.
Although Stefano did not immediately disclose his decision to ignore the two sequels (thus ignoring the character of Norman's aunt Emma Spool), horror fiction writer and critic Robert Price has noted that "Psycho IV seems to be intended as a direct sequel to the original Psycho, with no reference to Psycho II or III. Norman may have been healed and released from his first confinement, not from the confinement that takes place at the end of Psycho III." Horror writer James Futch regards this as a defect, complaining that the film "ignores much of the Psycho mythology".
Read more about this topic: Psycho IV: The Beginning
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
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“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)