Josiah Morgan’s review published on Letterboxd:
if anyone can actually give me a reason this movie is bad u can have a gold star (saying it didn't need to be made doesn't count and also i'm gonna disallow "it had bad performances" because a) the performances aren't bad, they're just based in exploitative genre-movie values but also b) all the performers knew they couldn't live up to the original so performed a camp psycho. cool.)
Anyway: Anne Heche is p. gorgeous, I love that Van Sant/Doyle totally utilize the fact that their Psycho remake //is actually in color wow!// and somehow make the story move even faster than it already did.
I'm also certain that there are Brechtian values in this film unexplored - the fact it's a shot-for-shot remake ruins immersion hence forcing the viewer to be entirely aware of their own relationship to the original film which in turn utterly destroys any semblance of tension the original may have established.
In both films, I feel like the watch-value gets significantly weaker after the shower scene. This is in no small part due to the magnificent performances of Janet Leigh and Anne Heche, performers which Hitchcock and Van Sant were lucky to pull into the project; furthermore the fact that they act as an amoral compass in a film filled with even less moralistic humans, leaving us to wallow in authoritarian modes of conduct and control, numerous loopholes ready to be jumped through by the characters, there's not much interesting there for the viewer. I don't even think it's top-tier Hitchcock, so much so to the extent that I actually prefer this version for all its academic complexities.
I dig that this is a subtle Giallo as soon as Heche steps onto the Bates Motel property; dig most of all that it works best as a comedy, almost everyone is totally hilarious in their respective roles, making previously horrific moments laughable.
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