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The plot has Norman open for business again after the events of the second movie. When we first see him, he is happily murdering birds in order to stuff them. As he sews one of them up, he has a nasty flash of sewing up mother's arms. It's a good image. We like Norman, even though we know what he is. It's his mother that's the monster, after all. Mother's hobbies have resumed, too, and director Perkins has a lot of fun with them. There is a sequence in this film in which Norman has a body hidden in the hotel's ice machine as the local sherriff questions him that is so morbidly funny that it is worthy of Hitchcock himself (it is strongly reminiscent of the potato truck scene in Frenzy, actually). Norman's delicate relationship with Mother is threatened by the arrival of a suicidal ex-nun (played by Diana Scarwid), and by the arrival of a snoopy reporter who thinks Norman might have picked up his old ways in the wake of a few unexplained disappearances. The nun has come to the Bates motel to kill herself. She bears a striking resemblance to Marion Crane (Janet Leigh's character from the first film), which sets Norman to obsessing over her. Mother will have none of that and decides to wait until she takes a bath to kill her. Perkins restages the shower scene at this point, but ambushes the viewer's expectations. When Mother pulls back the curtain, she finds the nun in a pool of blood already, her wrists slashed. This confuses Norman mightily and he calls for an ambulance instead of finishing the job. Norman begins to be attracted to the girl as she is nursed back to health and, shock of shocks, begins to split from Mother. Mother has other ideas. The nun is killed in a nasty accident that Norman will never be able to explain away and what remains of Norman's delicate sanity splits apart as his Norman side becomes Mother's active antagonist. Meanwhile, the reporter has made it to the bottom of things and confronts Norman with her knowledge in the film's climax.

Obviously, any film that bears the title "Psycho III" is going to dwell in Hitchcock's shadow. Perkins, directing himself, realizes this and does his level best to honor the first film even as he subverts its best sequences toward his own purposes. Perkins knows Norman inside and out and, as a director, plays with this knowledge in ways that other directors couldn't even conceive. There is a danger of self-parody in the approach that Perkins adopts in this film, but he is too sympathetic to the character to cross that line in earnest. And there are a couple of humdinger sequences here: the ice machine scene I mentioned earlier is one, the film's opening line (in which a distraught voice screams from a distance that, "There is no God!" ) is another, and the film's final confrontation between Norman and Mother is memorably grotesque. I like the way the film ends, with Norman being driven away in the back of the sherriff's cruiser. The sherriff tells Norman, "I'm disappointed in you Norman, very disappointed." Norman replies,"Yes, but this time I'll be free of her, really free..." As the car pulls away, Perkins repeats the final shot of the original, with Norman smiling enigmatically. He pulls Mother's mummified hand from beneath his jacket. He begins to stroke it as the audience realizes that he'll never be free of her. Ever.