Psycho '98. Not as good as The Birds 2.

Maire says:
The following is what it was like to watch this movie:

Woo, all-star cast! This is gonna be great! 

Oh... ok, well y’know, re-imagining and all that...

Oh... yeah, that’s not cool...

Really?! Eff this, I gotta work in the morning. G’night boys!

Corey says:
Ah, we've come full circle.  Remake.  The very word sends cold bolts of fear shooting from my body.  Any horror fan knows that the remake is a veritable crap shoot, and hopes for the best while preparing for the worst.  When Psycho '98 (talkin' 'bout 12 o'clock, don't be late) first started showing trailers, I was a wee young man, and not aware of how Hollywood can easily and totally destroy the icons of my youth.  Through investigation, I found out that it was a shot for shot remake with the same script.  How could this possibly go wrong?

Enter Norman.

Now, to be fair, Vince Vaughn (who is way better as a comedic actor) does a pretty solid job of working with the hand that he's dealt.  But, that hand is awful.  Remember our conversation about needing a sinister figure after the first Psycho?  Well, a horrible thing happened.  We had to make Norman himself the sinister figure in the remake.  Let's face it, by now (unless you're one of our hapless crew) you know the plot.  So, in order to get butts in the seat for this film, we had to spice Norman up a bit.  He goes from a harmless sexually repressed miscreant to malicious deviant.  Remember the watching-Marion-Crane-through-the-peephole scene?  Let's face it: any 14 year old with access to that hole would have done the same thing.  But now?  Oh, no, watching isn't enough.  We have make sure that the audience knows what kind of creep Norman is, because they already know that Mother is going to be rocking in a chair at the end of this film.  Let's add some jerking it sound effects! Surely, that's still subtle, right?  RIGHT??

It's sad, really.  It's sad that you could take a film that is a "shot for shot" remake, and fuck it up so badly.

Salty says:
My sister has this theory that a movie’s quality is inversely proportional to the number of A-list stars that are in it: one or two can make a good movie, but the more you add the more it gets dragged down, down, down into the depths. Gus Van Sant’s Psycho has more A-listers than I can count and it shows, but why is it bad? Is it because of the performances? Not completely. Independently, they really aren’t bad, though I find it hard to watch anyone but Anthony Perkins play Norman. Is it because it’s in color? That doesn’t help. Is it because of the shot-for-shot nature of the remake that begs comparisons between each scene, each actor, and each detail of the original film? Yeah, that’s probably the main reason.

But I think that the thing that really tips the scales from failed experiment to catastrophe is the audible masturbation. There is something about hearing the sounds of a man fondling himself while watching him peep on the girl that everyone knows that he is about to murder that creates a terrible discomfort. It just sucks all the fun out of the scene. Call me crazy, but I don’t want to hear that anymore than I want to watch Norman Bates clean up the voided bowels of his freshly murdered victim. Do I know that these things happen in real life? Yes, I do, but it just seems like its better left out of the movie.

My Own Private Idaho is pretty good though.

Maire	Corey	Salty
☆	☆	☆