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So doing a scene-for-scene remake of Psycho in 1998 wasn't going to transform the old, outdated Hitchcock movie into something fresh and new.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