"There is no god!!!" | Scanners

[Reverse zoom, cont.] Stronger: "Give me a sign. Help me."

[Static shot.] Silence.

Before we know it (in the third shot -- or the fourth, if you include the blackness between the Universal logo and the statue of the Virgin), we've smudged the line between "Psycho" (1960) and "Vertigo" (1958), looking up into a California mission belltower. A few vertiginous shots and a maniacal sniveling nun (and a few nice ones) later, and the movie is off to a rip-roaring psycho-vertiginous start.

Psych-- er, Vertigo?

The nuns approach Maureen (the hysterical novitiate) and attempt to coax her down from the archway where she is poised to throw herself, Kim Novak-like, from the tower. "There is no god!" Maureen cries again -- not in rage but in despair, as if she's just discovered a shattering, horribly disappointing truth.

The crazy nun raves: "You wretched girl! How dare you!"

The eldest nun tries to snap her out of it: "Please Maureen, you mustn't. You have an obligation to Him!"

"I have nothing," Maureen says dejectedly. "I am nothing!"

Another blonde, another belltower...

And then all hell breaks loose.

That's just the first four minutes, before the titles. And it's not giving too much away to say that Maureen becomes Norman Bates' very first girlfriend. They're a match made in... wherever.

Inverted crosses, anyone?

"Psycho III" is a joy, a sequel that understands the original from the inside out. It's a celebration, a satire, a revisitation, and a deeply felt, detail-perfect homage to Hitchcock's bleak masterpiece. (I'd say "Psycho" is not so much an atheistic work as a nihilistic one. The specificity of the opening sequence perversely indicates the randomness of the particular story the movie chooses to tell. And Simon Oakland's psychobabble wrap-up at the end mocks not only psychology but any and all belief systems.)