Gus Van Sant's Psycho (1998)

I had just seen an episode of Homicide in which Wallace Shawn played an arthouse theater owner who poisoned an obnoxious patron who kept shouting spoilers to old movies. He shouted out the ending to Casablanca and alerted people to the shower scene in Psycho. They said he was ruining the movies for everyone, like people who go to those things didn't already know every plot twist. There was a theater that showed Citizen Kane and offered a prize to anyone who could correctly guess what "Rosebud" was. Of course, every single person got it.

So doing a scene-for-scene remake of Psycho in 1998 wasn't going to transform the old, outdated Hitchcock movie into something fresh and new. 

But, obviously, Gus Van Sant did this as an experiment. At least he said he did.

Hitchcock himself made Psycho as an experiment to see if he could make a movie using the crew from his TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It was a low budget movie, but Van Sant remade it with a large budget. Even if the remake had been good, what would it prove?

In fairness, though, is any movie really necessary?

Some parts weren't as bad as I thought they'd be, but I kept comparing it to the original. I don't know what I would have thought if I had never seen the original, but it wasn't an improvement.

Norman Bates was bigger than Marion Crane's boyfriend in this one, and Marion's sister actually gives him a hand when he's fighting with Norman at the end, didn't just stand there like Vera Miles.

I might have paid to see it in a theater if I'd known Chad Everett and Rance Howard were in it.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

Blood Harvest (1987)

A slasher movie. A young woman returns home from college to her parents' home in farm country. She's dismayed that the farmers are targeting her parents for abuse because her father works for the bank that was foreclosing on farms at the time. There's a slasher killing people, hanging them upside down and cutting their throats. 

I remember the left supporting farmers during the foreclosure crisis. I don't know if this was misguided since it was recently pointed out that farmers tend to be millionaires which was why they supported Trump. Not that we should have sided with the banks.

I clicked on this movie because Tiny Tim was in it playing a bit of a simpleton who goes through most of the movie dressed as a clown. The first I ever heard of him must have been in 1969. A kid in my preschool saw him on Laugh-In the night before and said there was a hippie who played a tiny guitar and sang like a girl. I don't remember my reaction, whether I was intrigued or uninterested. He sang a little in the film. He got top billing and was sort of the hero at the end.

It wasn't that upsetting for a slasher film. Some nudity. There were shots of a dead pig. With Peter Krause from such shows as Sports Nught and Six Feet Under. His first acting credit on IMDb.

Free on Tubi.

Maps to the Stars (2014) David Cronenberg

This was the first movie Canadian director David Cronenberg filmed (partially) in Los Angeles. All his earlier movies were shot in Canada and the UK. Maps to the Stars comes across as an attack on Hollywood but I don't know if it really was since the people in it had issues you can't blame on the movie industry. There was  middle-aged actress Havana (Julianne Moore). She had been sexually abused by her mother, a great movie star who died fairly young. Havana wants to star in a remake of a movie her mother had gotten an Oscar nomination for, and now she's having hallucinations. She sees her mother in a bathtub saying terrible things to her. 

And there was Benji (Evan Bird), an exceptionally bratty 13-year-old star. He has a dangerously mentally ill sister who had just been released from a sanitarium. His parents didn't know that their marriage was incestuous until it was too late. The poor kid's a recovering drug addict and is starting to hallucinate himself. 

We see Benji hanging around in clubs with other tween celebrities, the girls referring to an actress in her early 20's as "menopausal" and a teen idol who tells about his sewage being stolen by the teamster charged with maintaining his trailer and sold to a deranged fan.

Evan Bird was great in this movie, but he hasn't appeared in anything since. Maybe it turned him off to show business. The scene in this that stood out to me was Benji hanging around at his friend's house. He unloads the family revolver and starts playing with it. He puts it to his head a couple of times and pulls the trigger. We saw him unload it, but you know nothing good can come of this.

With Mia Wasikowska, Robert Pattison and John Cusack.

Available on The Criterion Channel, or you can pay a few bucks to see it on Prime, Apple TV or Fandango.