A Haunted House Without the Ghosts (or the Charm)
Some horror films stick to your ribs like a greasy diner meal—Psycho being the greasy cheeseburger we never forgot. Then there’s Bates Motel (1987), the reheated mystery meat left under the heat lamp too long, the kind you wouldn’t feed even to Norman Bates’ stuffed birds. Released as a made-for-TV “event” and meant to be the pilot for a series no one asked for, the film instead stands as a tombstone for the corpse of creativity, propped up on NBC’s Sunday night lineup like a cadaver in a cheap suit.
It promises the world: “Come back to the Bates Motel! Norman’s legacy lives on!” Instead, what you get is Bud Cort wandering around like a nervous department store mannequin, Jason Bateman phoning in an early-career shrug, and Lori Petty doing her best impression of a punk rock Nancy Drew. The only thing this film resurrects is the ghost of squandered potential.
Meet Alex West: Norman’s Imaginary Friend
Here’s the genius idea: rather than center on Norman Bates—one of cinema’s most twisted, fascinating villains—we get Alex West, a new character with the charisma of a damp sponge. Played by Bud Cort, Alex is introduced as a boy who murdered his abusive stepfather, landed in an asylum, and bonded with Norman over Jell-O cups and electroshock therapy. Then, when Norman dies (off-screen, mercifully for Anthony Perkins), Alex inherits the motel. Yes, the Bates Motel. The home of one of the most infamous murder sprees in cinema history is just casually transferred like an old couch in a yard sale.
Cort plays Alex as though he’s perpetually on the verge of either enlightenment or a panic attack, but never commits to either. His wide-eyed innocence is supposed to be tragic. Instead, he looks like a man who lost his glasses in a fog machine. If Norman Bates was a cracked mirror, Alex West is a foggy bathroom mirror after a long shower: you know something should be there, but it’s just steam and disappointment.
Haunted by Bad Writing
“Ghosts” wander the motel halls, but instead of chilling suspense, we’re treated to Scooby-Doo-level revelations: it was the bank manager in the attic with a bedsheet! Richard Rothstein, who both wrote and directed, apparently confused horror with sitcom hijinks. The supernatural element has all the menace of a Halloween hayride in daylight. Mrs. Bates, once the stuff of nightmares, is reduced to a prank played by a middle-aged banker desperate to avoid foreclosure. That’s not horror. That’s Capitalism: The Haunted House Edition.
Even when the film tries for earnestness—like a subplot where a depressed divorcée encounters a gaggle of ghostly prom kids who convince her not to kill herself—it lands with the subtlety of a suicide hotline commercial written by a guidance counselor on Valium. The tonal whiplash is staggering: one minute, it’s bad slapstick with fake hauntings; the next, it’s a Hallmark card about embracing life. Psycho made us afraid to shower. Bates Motel makes us afraid to watch TV alone—not because it’s scary, but because someone might walk in and see us watching this.
The Cast Checks In (But We Check Out)
There’s a cruel irony in the cast list. You’ve got Jason Bateman, years before Arrested Development, slumming it as a spectral prom kid. You’ve got Lori Petty as Willie, a streetwise runaway who provides Alex with sidekick energy, though half her lines sound like they were cribbed from an after-school special. Moses Gunn is wasted as the motel handyman, stuck muttering exposition while wishing he were back on Broadway. Gregg Henry plays a predatory banker with all the subtlety of a Scooby-Doo villain (“and I would’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling motel owners!”).
Then there’s Kurt Paul, the poor soul cast as Norman Bates in a cameo, forever remembered as the Great Value Anthony Perkins. He shows up in asylum flashbacks, and his resemblance to Perkins is uncanny in the way knockoff cereal looks “kind of like” Frosted Flakes but tastes like stale sugar dust. Seeing him only reminds you of what’s missing—namely, Perkins himself, and by extension, any reason to keep watching.
NBC’s Empty Room
It’s worth remembering that this wasn’t meant to be a one-off disaster. NBC thought it could milk the Bates brand into a weekly series. Imagine that: every Sunday night, new haunted hijinks at the Bates Motel! Norman Bates would’ve spun in his grave—if only the movie hadn’t buried him alive in mediocrity. The network canned the idea before it could metastasize into an actual series, leaving this pilot to rot as a curious footnote in horror history.
The problem isn’t just that it fails as a Psycho sequel. It fails as television. It fails as horror. It fails as drama. It even fails as camp. If you’re going to torch Hitchcock’s legacy for ratings, at least be entertaining about it. Bates Motel instead is 95 minutes of cinematic drywall: flat, beige, and inexplicably still standing.
Dark Humor in the Vacancy
There’s an unintentionally funny moment when Alex, looking straight into the camera, cheerfully invites us to stop by the motel anytime: “I can’t say for sure what you’ll find, but that’s what makes the world go round.” What we find is despair, Alex. Despair and the taste of reheated TV dinners. You can practically hear the NBC executives screaming into their cocktails: “This was supposed to be our next Twilight Zone! Instead we got Gilligan’s Island with corpses!”
It’s the kind of film where you half-expect the Motel’s neon sign to flicker not “VACANCY” but “APOLOGY.” It’s where the horror isn’t in the ghosts, but in the realization that you’ve spent an hour and a half watching a rejected pilot from 1987, and you’re never getting that time back. Norman Bates stabbed his victims. This movie just bores them to death.
Final Judgment
Bates Motel (1987) is the cinematic equivalent of finding out your favorite restaurant is under new management, only to discover it’s now a Chuck E. Cheese staffed by ghosts. Hitchcock’s original Psycho redefined horror. This? This redefined how low a franchise can sink when wrung dry by executives looking for “content” before “content” was even a buzzword.
If Roger Ebert had been forced to review it, I suspect he’d have given it half a star and then demanded hazard pay. As for me? I checked in, I sat through it, and I left wishing Mrs. Bates’ ghost would’ve put me out of my misery.
