In the most primitive sense, the film still works. Why, I've never seen anything like it since that case in Fairvale, California, back in 1960." Finally, the Alfred half of him took over and he started making Hitchcock's movies.
He dressed like him, he talked like him, he was even capable of holding conversations with him. It seems that some years ago, Gus accidentally destroyed a tape of 'Psycho' in his VCR. Or rather with the Alfred half of Gus's personality. Why? Why, indeed? Hmmm, perhaps we should ask a. He's traced it, at a cost of $25 million. So Van Sant has not remade, reinvented, reimagined, reincarnated the original.
The movie psycho 1998 full#
But it's still word for word and edit by edit Joseph Stefano's script with its vulgar humor ("Mom's not herself today," says Norman Bates, when first we meet him), its sense of creepy menace, its cheap but effective shocks and, perhaps most helpful of all, a full orchestration (by Danny Elfman) of Bernard Herrmann's stirring score, which conveyed much of the sense of pathology in the film. It's nearly (but not quite) a shot-by-shot re-creation of the Hitchcock classic with a somewhat arbitrary scheme of updates, with different interpretations of the roles, different cadences in the line readings, a bit more explicit nudity and violence, and the miracle of color. Surely the most peculiar film to come from Hollywood since at least "The Terror of Tiny Town," the 1938 all-midget western, Gus Van Sant's reiteration of Hitchcock's "Psycho" never answers its only important question: Why? Graphic gore, emotional intensity and very loud music Vince Vaughn plays Norman Bates in "Psycho." 'Psycho': Better Than Hitchcock? Get Real