By Jerry Roberts
October 22, 2002

Now THIS is a sacrilege!

As a guy who loves movies, I find that there are films that I have seen so many times that I know every line, every nuance. I know when the curtains blow, I know when the shoes shuffle on the floor. I know when there is a lilt in the voice and a hair out of place. That's why the remake of Psycho makes me itch.

I would personally like to throttle anyone associated with this unnecessary and baffling attempt to reverse the adage that "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Hitchcock's Psycho is a piece of music, it's poetry, it a painting and it has been remade by people who don't recognize it as such.

My first reaction upon meeting Marion Crane and Sam Loomis during their tawdry motel meeting was "Who are you people?" I thought that this might be a plus since seeing Sam and Marion and not recognizing them might refresh the surprises. That hope didn't last.

There is a perfect moment in Hitchcock's film when Janet Leigh is driving away from Phoenix and imagining the conversation that is going on with her boss and the man from whom she has just stolen $40,000. We hear the imagined conversation and marvel as Leigh's face turns from nervousness to wicked triumph. In the remake, Anne Heche tries the same thing but looks like she has just eaten a grasshopper.

The same goes for Heche's wardrobe. Leigh's black outfit was tight, sexy and far too obvious, given that she had just committed a crime. Heche's billowing, bright orange dress and parasol might as well have been embroitered "HI, I'M MARION! I STOLE 40 GRAND! ARREST ME!!"

The same goes for Norman Bates. As played by Anthony Perkins, he was skinny, a small man, always nervous and trembling. Burly Vince Vaughn is like a football player and takes up too much space. The magic of Hitchcock's parlor scene was that it was shot at low angles to make Norman appear to shrink in the presence of the stuffed birds. Vaughn looks as if he could chow down on one at any moment.

Oddly enough, the worst thing about the remake of Psycho are those elements which have been changed. Example: When Norman spies on Marion through the hole in the parlor wall, he masturbates. The audience that was in attendence laughed, which is absolutely the wrong reaction. Another example: The ending, which originally focused just on the back of the car before irising out is now a long pull-back over an extended credit sequence. This again deadens the impact.

Having said that, the worst thing about Hitchcock's film has not been touched here: the doctor's psychoanalysis of Norman's split personality. It has always seemed like an anti-climax. I think that it would have been better if we could have pieced Norman's problem together in our own minds and that the psychiatrist's speech had simply ended with "Norman Bates no longer exists, he only half existed to begin with." In this film, Director Gus Van Sant is so specific about getting the speech to exactly match the timing of the earlier film that Robert Forester reads it off like he's double-parked.

Robert Kennedy famously said "Some people look at things and say 'why' but I look at the same things and say 'why not'?" Typically, I'm in agreement with Kennedy but in this case I have to ask 'why'?