I found the previous entry into the Psycho universe – the one directed by Anthony Perkins – to be fine enough even if a little bit simplistic and amateurish, both in the script and the direction. And even though Mick Garris' reputation as the nicest guy in Hollywood is warranted, he's never been as good a director as he's been a facilitator of the genre – along with most of the critics I found Riding the Bullet very underwhelming.

So I wasn't expecting much out of the last entry in the series before Gus van Sant remade the original in 1998 and TV networks would try to flog the dead horse even more with Bates Motel, but I was pleasantly surprised.

Norman (Perkins) has now spent time for the murders we saw him commit in the last film, but as we know just like he does, he'll never be less than what the title promises. As we meet him he's in the kitchen of an attractive home cooking a sumptuous dinner for his wife, a nurse he met while last institutionalised.

He's also listening to the popular radio show where Fran (CCH Pounder) is talking about matricide, of whom Norman is the most notorious example in history. She has a psychiatrist on the program who once treated him, and in fun cameo trivia, her director in the booth is played by John Landis (famous himself for casting director colleagues in his own movies) and the operator is Garris' wife Cynthia.

Norman, taking exception to the timbre of the conversation, calls in to the show to put them right, calling himself Ed. Even more disturbingly, he tells them his first murder put him on a long path that saw him not only kill countless other women including his mother, but is about to cause him to kill again,

Fran and her team want to keep Norman on the line and have him open up more, maybe talking him into giving himself up or at least not killing again. But the psychiatrist wants none of it, warning them they're playing with fire and suspecting (correctly) that they're only interested in the rating and popularity boost.

So Norman tells his story, and we flash back to his teenage years, played by a post-ET, pre-Mike Flanagan Henry Thomas, who shares a loving but disturbingly Oedipal relationship with his mother (Olivia Hussey). She alternately smothers and berates and ignores him, insisting on quashing any signs of sexual development out of him thanks to the trouble male sexual interest has had in her life, instead turning their relationship weirdly sexual in its place.

Norman tries to enjoy the various milestones of a boy his age – particularly his first sexual experience, but the hatred in his mother's voice in his head is too strong, and every normal developmental experience he has ends up with a lone figure emerging from another room wearing a floral neck-to-knee dress and scraggly hair, a butcher knife in hand...

You spend most of the film thinking the psychiatrist is going to come back at the last minute and play a major part in the proceedings, or that the radio show crew are going to somehow be pivotal, but the movie leaves them both behind quite suddenly and ignominiously and never comes back to them, making you wonder why they were even there.

But Garris is working with better material than the script the previous movie had, so it's a lot more interesting to see play out. It also leans further into the aspects of psychosexual misdevelopment you can imagine Norman would have in real life, showing the squeamish and contradictory relationship he had with his mother in more detail than before.

Perkins is (as always) a little bit stiff, obviously choosing it to convey a guy who's buttoned up to hide a monster beneath. But with a much better story, it was very hard to get wrong.