Reviews: Psycho

[JoBlo]

JoBlo's 6/10 review of PSYCHO can be found here: http://www.joblo.com/psycho.htm
Your past movie reviews from May 1998 - November 2001 can be found there as well.

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[PopTarts57]

Let me put this out there first...the oiginal Psycho is one of my all-time favorite movies. It's full of great performances (especially by Tony Perkins as Norman Bates), and lots of mystery and suspense. Hitchcock is the man. I was surprised at how Van Sant kept the original script for his remake. This isn't 1960. At times, the lines were so outdated it was laughable. But it made you appreciate how ood Stephano's script really is. None of the performances to that great. Vaughn was only OK as Bates...he lacked the quiet, sorrowful nature that Perkins had. In the original you felt sorry for Norman. In the remake, you just thought about how annoying his laugh comes off. Anne Heche is worse, though. Her quick, overdone facial expressions were quite annoying and she looked like robot saying the lines. Viggo Mortenson was probably the worst choice on earth for Sam Loomis. John Gavin's Loomis was a likable straight-arrow. Mortenson's is somewhat sleezy and uncaring. And William H. Macy come off really annoying as the detective Arbogast. His stupid "If it don't gel it ain't Jello" line seemed so unnatural and while Marty Balsam's Arbogast was smart and likable, you just want Macy to get off the screen fast. You don't even feel sorry for him whn he dies. The whole "film in color" thing was annoying to. First of all, Hitchcock purposely shot PSYCHO in blak and white for symbloic reasons and to have shadows to induce greater mystery. Anyone who can't sit through a black and white film because it's black and white is just stupid. Plus...that dress Anne Heche was wearing?????? Good Lord, it looked like wallpaper! Overall,this was a brave attempt to remake PSYCHO, but a dumb. I;d watch it again if I needed a good laugh.

[Requiem-for-a-Dream]

This is a travesty of a film. The original Psycho is brilliant and scary as hell. This is crappy on every level. You don't remake a 10/10 classic without doing it justice and making it at least a little different. I give it a low 3/10.

Matt

[XCoRyX]

this was also one of the worst remakes,a disgrace,travesty and one of the worst movies ever....1/10

[NotKeyserSoze]

Now technically speaking, this is a good movie. Norman is a great character, the story is great, and all the camera shots are clever. The music's good, and the ending's great.

But sadly this is a brand new meaning of the term "remake": scene for scene, shot for shot, same score, same lines copy of an outstanding original. Anthony Perkins charmed and chilled back in 1960 with Hitchcock's masterpiece... and here it is so plaguerised they might aswell have re-released the original. There's truly no point to this "same but with colour" repeat of before. The only additions are good signs of what Hollywood has come to: When Anne Heche's character (opening scene) is with her boyfriend, we hear a couple having sex next door. Didn't in 1960... didn't need to. And later on, when Norman is watching her through a peephole, he starts masturbating. Didn't do that in 1960... would the censors have allowed it, it still wouldn't have been needed. Excessive, pointless, and disgusting in a way completely unbefitting of the film.

So although I saw this before the original (shame on me) I still regard it as a cheat of a movie. If it's good at all, if you enjoy any part of it, then you are enjoying what it has stolen from the original. This is an insult to film, like a cheating film student copying the tricks of the trade off the director sitting next to them. It is technically not even classifiable as a movie in it's own right. 0/10