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Psycho (1998)
Rate:
1
Viewed:
6/06, 7/19
6/06:
What the fuck was going on in Gus Van Sant's head when he agreed to plagiarize Psycho?
Not only Gus did that abominable piece of shit, but he also went an extra step further to insult Alfred Hitchcock by
including a masturbation scene which is absolutely unfathomable. I'm sure everybody went, "Oh, yeah.
Psycho, that's an American classic" and then proceeded to unzip their fly to
piss on it.
It's one of the worst films I've ever seen in my life. It was copied scene for scene. Everybody who was part
of the remake should be shamed, and Vince Vaughn will burn forever in cinema hell for what he did.
All in all, Alfred Hitchcock is fucking spinning in his coffin.
7/19:
Gus Van Sant's Psycho is what gives remakes a bad name.
The point of them, in which he totally misses, is to improve on the original after discovering some faults.
The Thing and Cape Fear are good examples.
Yet Psycho had none to begin with and is a bona fide horror masterpiece. Instead, Gus
practically lifts everything from it by looking at the movie itself and tells everybody, "I want you to do this and that
in the exact same way." In fact, it isn't even a remake but a pure rip-off which was gladly green-lit by Universal Studios.
Pat Hitchcock commented that his father would've been thrilled with the whole exercise. No, she's wrong. He would be
spinning in his grave, having been appalled at what the fuck just happened. Not only is the remake a virtual
scene-for-scene (shot-for-shot isn't exactly the correct term) of the original, but it's also masturbated upon. I can
imagine Anthony Perkins losing five years of his life by this alone. He would've been pissed off, too,
about the gay innuendos made by several commentators in the DVD special Psycho Path. That's not what the movie was
about; it's Norman Bates murdering people while pretending to be his mother.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the 1998 version is the original and that Alfred Hitchcock's picture doesn't exist.
It'll still get a '1' from me because of the terrible performances. Plus, every single scene is poorly executed with
an E.T. doing the butchering in the shower. Now, changing the cirumstances by assuming the original exists, there are no
surprises or shocking moments; it happened in 1960, the very first time the movie was shown, and it's history. When the
plagiarized remake came out, everybody, including me, was already past the point.
As for the two central characters, Anne Heche is awful. She even sucks in math by missing the subtracted total by a dollar.
Vince Vaughn is goofy stupid. To compare them with Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins, respectively, is night and day. It's
obvious by their facial expressions alone.
What's with the Boogie Nights cast? I see three of them: Julianne Moore (with her
walkman on!), William H. Macy, and Philip Baker Hall. The first two have done a great job of stabbing
Psycho to death with their abysmal performances. Robert Forster is like "ah,
fuck it" when he gave the Simon Oakland speech.
Andrei Konchalovsky said remaking Psycho could be compared to doing Hamlet
or Othello for the umpteenth time. But there lies the difference: both are plays which are left to open
interpretation while Gun Van Sant lifted everything from the original with slight differences. In fact, I think it's the
only film ever to have been done this way.
Joseph Stefano's writing was given a face-lift to make it more attuned to the 90's, yet I shudder at the line, "If it don't
jell, it ain't Jell-O, and this just ain't jelling" when the following original line sounds better, "You see, if it doesn't
jell, it isn't aspic, and this ain't jelling."
All in all, Gus Van Sant ruined his reputation when he plagiarized Psycho.