Directed by Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting)
Written by Joseph Stephano
Starring Vince Vaughn (Swingers), Julianne Moore (Short Cuts), Anne Heche (Six Days, Seven Nights), William H. Macy (Fargo), Viggo Mortenson (Crimson Tide)
It's a first for me. No, I didn't commit one of the deadly sins of critiquing and not see Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. But Gus Van Sant's Psycho is a first for me. I've seen remakes by the dozen, re-hashed plots and stolen shots. But Gus Van Sant beats everyone else with Psycho, his very first studio film.
Normally I'm against anyone who regularly does indies going into studio films, but you have to remember that Gus Van Sant's a big dog now, and he can do pretty much whatever the hell he pleases. And as his first wish, he wished to do the remake of Psycho that he'd been itching to do.
Normally I'm also against remakes. They're generally inferior to the first, except in rare instances. But this one, copying Hitchcock virtually shot-by-shot and line-by-line, gives something that I regard as a step below sequels a good name.
Gus Van Sant's Psycho is actually not only as good as, but in fact better in some ways than the first. The slight changes that Van Sant makes -- in lines, in actors, in shots -- make the 1998 Psycho creepier than the first.
The plot's still the same of course: Marion Crane steals $400,000 in order to pay off her boyfriend's debts and run away with him. She's about to make it but she almost falls asleep at the wheel so she stops at the Bates Motel. At the Bates Motel, she is victim to the shower-scene, which every horror filmmaker aspires to even get close to.
What follows is one of the finest mystery-thrillers ever made.
The thing that seperates Psycho 1990s from Psycho 1960s is Vince Vaughn. He's proven his prowess as a psychopath (from what I've heard) in Clay Pigeons, and he applies this brilliance to Psycho, in which he rubs off ten times scarier than Anthony Perkins did in the first. Anne Heche, sadly, makes her worst performance: I'm glad she dies. Julianne Moore does her usual great, and Viggo Mortenson and William H. Macy do the basic cheap performance.
The other two things that makes it better is Gus Van Sant. Van Sant, at the time of death for everyone, inserts the right subliminal flash in to add an aura of sympathy, surreallity, and mystery to their death. This minor (four shot) difference transforms Psycho into a more lyrical film. Oh, yeah, and then there's Danny Elfman's remastering of the score, which puts the rather annoying violin notes on a synthesizer and gives a new, electric sound to the music that annoyyed everyone by the end of Hitchcock's Psycho.
I'm not bashing Hitchcock's Psycho: don't get me wrong, I loved it. But, having seen both I love this one more. My pessimism was wrong: Gus Van Sant can do no wrong.