Psycho (1998)

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  May 5, 2012

  jlewis07

  I'm not exactly sure why this movie was made considering it is the EXACT same movie as it was before...just in color and with current actors. All this will do is make people go back to the original and remember why it is a classic. Not that this movie is bad necessarily... it's n... read moreot, but it is incredibly pointless. The actors did a good job and it's just as entertaining as the original in my opinion, but it just shouldn't have been made.

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  October 28, 2011

  fb1664868775

  In this age of bad remakes, is it really such a bad thing that Van Sant did a shot by shot remake of this classic? Though it still in no way compares to the original, it is an entertaining experiment. It's also cool to see the Bates Motel in color and some great performances. Wil... read moreliam H. Macy was perfect in the role of the Private Detective and the real show stealer is the speech at the end by Robert Forster playing the psychiatrist.

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  August 26, 2011

  fb100000040220993

  Here's an exercise in futility. This was a shot-by-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's classic film from the 60's. There were absolutely no chances taken here, and the film falls flat on it's face. Even though it traces Hitchcock's version, the talent is inferior, and the story ... read morefeels out of place in a modern setting. I would have respected Van Sant a lot more if he would have at least attempted to make the material his own. If you want to see Psycho, watch Hitchcock's.

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  August 17, 2011

  spielberg00

  First, let's get the actors' flaws out of the way: although Vince Vaughn does look somewhat like Anthony Perkins' 1960 Norman Bates, Anne Heche has no resemblance at all of Janet Leigh. And they really don't act all that greatly, either. From just seeing a few scenes of the 199... read more8 PSYCHO remake, it is clear that this one is an exact, shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's thrilling classic. This, though new and in color, is not a classic. It is as if the filmmakers decided to take the original 1960 screenplay and use that without changing it at all--but wouldn't it make more sense to write another, different screenplay off the book this is based on? I guess they all overlooked that. So if the 1998 version of PSYCHO looks appealing to you, go ahead, but I advise you, it's basically the 1960 version, minus the good acting, minus the thrills, plus the color aspect. This is no match for the 1960 classic, and it is in no way a classic itself.

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  February 11, 2011

  LoughnerWasLucid

  Vince Vaughn likes to eat skittles.

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  May 16, 2010

  deano

  This remake of a classic Hitchcock movie is average, but very familiar scenes to the 1960 version and few lack of creepy. Did they honestly think Vince Vaughn was going to be as good or better than Anthony Perkins? No way. Anne Heche, with her short mannish-haircut, is going to b... read moree better than Janet Leigh? I don't think so!
  Horror remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho.

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  February 23, 2010

  FilmFanatik

  It's not that bad.

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  January 22, 2010

  matertenebraum

  I was very surprised that they were going to do this uh, Psycho remake because it is kind of sacred ground. For people who live in the religion of film, this is, like, sanctimonious stuff, and so you're messing with the Bible.
  
  Hitchcock's Psycho is a work of art, the "Mona Lisa"... read more is a work of art, "David" is a work of art, Van Gogh's paintings are a work of art. Why do you re-create a work of art? I don't get it.
  
  
  Gus Van Sant's heroic, I would say, act, I would say suicidal. Only someone as deranged and talented as Gus would think about doing this, it's like, uh, Scientology, it's like some people are intrigued, some people are joining. some people are, like, totally aghast it exists, afraid. I wish they didn't think they had to do it, I think there are too many filmmakers today who are recycling old ideas, it's part of the whole postmodern sensibility of recycling, redoing as if we have no new things to do, new subjects, new attitudes. I think we're appropriating the legacy of-of a classic to say, "Don't venerate these things too much".
  
  Over Gus Van Sants remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) there hangs, like a neon sign in the sky, the single question Why?? The idea of even doing this remake it cames from having Gus meetings with the studios and having them say, "We do have some projects you might be interested in" It's the ultimate postmodern conceit the shot-for-shot remake of a classic film. Even down to the use of the same script, the same musical score and the director making a cameo in exactly the same scene that Alfred Hitchcock did in the original. Psycho 98 is surely the ultimate fin du siecle celebration of the view that all originality is dead and that all creativity is left with anymore is the endless quoting and reshuffling of the past. Psycho seems constructed as a vanity exercise, a conceit the same way that commercials quote and parody scenes from films or people construct three-dimensional dioramas of classic works of art one that seems to have been made more just to see if it could be done than to serve any real purpose. For what point can a film that admits the original cannot be bettered so much so that it can only copy it shot for shot possibly serve it is a work that has openly and loudly cheered the unsurpassable superiority of the original even before it has opened? And needless to say Psycho earned itself a thorough hammering even before a single commentator had seen a frame of it for its daring to desecrate a classic ? some online film sites even called for a boycott. Indeed the more one looks at the thinking that has motivated the remake, the more there seems to be an overwhelming a sense of pointlessness to it. It panders to a lowest common denominator in an audience the film's sole commercial hopes lay in the belief that modern 16-25 year old audiences are too lazy to watch a film that is made in black-and-white or without contemporary stars. Yet the irony of it is that the niche audience it is aimed at that I spoke to found the whole exercise slow-paced and tedious, they being too familiar with the modern psycho-thriller conventions that the original Psycho created to find much originality or novelty to it.
  
  Gus Van Sant has made some fine commercial films To Die For (1995) and Good Will Hunting (1997) and critically acclaimed hits like Milk (2008) but also balances these with films that are made with an eccentricity that seems to willfully challenge an audience's patience the likes of My Own Private Idaho (1991) and the universally reviled Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1994). The latter two were more of a challenge than most audiences and reviewers were prepared to tolerate and it seems that with Psycho Van Sant allowed his penchant for eccentricity to bite off more than he can chew.
  
  In its favour, Psycho is never as ghastly a desecration of the original that other films like the campy King Kong (1976) or The Haunting (1999) remakes were, or one that messes with the effectiveness of the original in an attempt to appeal to a more upbeat flavour like The Vanishing (1993) and Diabolique (1996) remakes did. The sense of desecration that exists is more in the conceit that someone has dared to mess with one of the untouchable classics. Being a shot-for-shot remake, Psycho 98 closely adheres to the original and cannot help but work in many of the places that the original did.
  
  The remake makes a number of minor changes. The $40,000 that Marion Crane steals is inflation-adjusted to $400,000; Van Sant is free to show more graphic blood-letting during the shower scene; and there is now a spider that crawls out of the mouth of the mummified remains of Mrs Bates. But the addition of colour works against the film. It bleeds out all of the stark, atmospheric effectiveness the original had. The depiction of ordinary Arizona desert landscape here lacks any of the same alienating effectiveness that the black-and-white photography lent to the original. Similarly so the black-and-white made Alfred Hitchcock's low angle shots up on Norman Bates framed by his stuffed birds seem to eerily foreshadow something sinister but the colour robs the shots of any atmosphere. And without black-and-white the Bates house up on the hill behind the motel loses all of its looming, foreboding Gothic ominousness.
  
  The most radical changes Gus Van Sant makes are to bring out something much more overtly sexual in the material. We get a brief side glimpse of Anne Heche's breast as she undresses for the shower and a brief labial shot as she keels over dead. There are sounds of panting from neighbouring rooms during the motel room tryst between Marion and Loomis that opens the film; the client whose money Marion steals is more overtly flirtatious with her; the visit to Norman's room shows a stash of pornography. But the most radical affront to purists is Van Sant's having Norman clearly heard to be masturbating as he peeps at Marion undressing in the shower.
  
  The film's publicity proudly quotes Alfred Hitchcock's daughter saying that remaking a film shot for shot is exactly something her father would do. (She seems unaware of the fact that Hitchcock did remake one of his own films 1934's The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1956 although not shot-for-shot). One thing Hitchcock would never have done though is cast Anne Heche. The petite and almost anorexically thin Anne Heche is far from a Hitchcock woman Hitchcock always preferred well-rounded women, usually frosted blondes Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren, Janet Leigh. You know exactly what Norman means here in his line when he says that Marion eats like a bird. It could be a line coined to describe Anne Heche's performance she seems all twitchy, nervous energy. But while she conveys that part quite well, there seems to be almost nothing else to the character.
  
  However she is far better than Vince Vaughn's Norman Bates. Alas for Vaughn, Anthony Perkins was Norman Bates. It was a piece of casting that was a truly harmonious marriage of actor and the role at hand. And Anthony Perkins nervous and twitchy, shy boy next door quality became so completely Norman that it ended up typecasting him for the rest of his career. And while Vince Vaughn is a good actor, what you end up watching here is his handsome good looks made down to an unnaturally pasty pallor and him merely imitating Anthony Perkins's shy twitchiness. It is like watching an impressionist imitate another actor. He maintains a certain twitch and a smile, but it is an affectation more than it is a performance.
  
  Far better are some of the supporting performances. William H. Macy makes for a surprisingly good Arbogast. Macy has developed a tendency toward laidback characters that seem like genially ineffectual nuclear family patriarchs caught in a time warp from the 1950s mouthing boy scout euphenisms. He and Gus Van Sant do a good job of working with Macy?s amiable, ineffectual persona while showing a sharp intelligence hidden beneath the surface. Also extremely good is Viggo Mortensen one of the most underrated actors of the 1990s ? who makes Sam Loomis a solid, earthy small town working man.
  
  Gus Van Sant would later return to the psycho genre with the interesting Elephant (2003) about a high-school shooting.
  
  
  My reaction to the remake of Psycho: Please don't do it, if something's not broke, don't try to fix it. They're gonna get crucified, why would they want to redo that one? If people want to see a Hitchcock film, they should go watch the original Psycho.
  
  You do not try to remake perfection.

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  January 6, 2010

  ythelastman89

  Just a complete butchering of one of Hitchcock's masterpieces. I have absolutely no idea what Gus Van Sant was thinking when he decided that he was going to remake a classic with Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates. It's best left unseen, even if you just want to see a complete piece of... read more trash thrown together on screen.

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  May 16, 2009

  flixsterman

  This is no homage to Hitchcock, this is theatrical blasphemy.

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• Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates
• Anne Heche as Marion Crane
• Julianne Moore as Lila Crane
• Viggo Mortensen as Sam Loomis
• William H. Macy as Milton Arbogast
• Robert Forster as Dr. Simon
• Philip Baker Hall as Sheriff Chambers
• Anne Haney as Mrs. Chambers
• Chad Everett as Tom Cassidy

Click a thumb to vote on that suggestion, or add your own suggestions.

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• • Norman Bates: We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven't you?
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• • Norman Bates: We all go a little mad sometimes.
• Check in. Unpack. Relax. Take a shower..
• The classic story of a boy and his mother.
• Two actresses connected to the role of Marion Crane were Nicole Kidman and Drew Barrymore.

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