Psycho (1998) Review

Psycho was directed by Gus Van Sant and stars Vince Vaughn (from The Cell), Anne Heche (from Nothing Left To Fear) and Julianne Moore (from Carrie, Shelter, The Forgotten). It’s the same exact movie as the original Psycho from 1960, virtually frame for frame, word for word.

A new vision of a classic nightmare.

I had seen this remake of Psycho from ’98 floating around for years but never got around to seeing it. I never actually had much interest in it at all. Never seen the trailer, never read a review. But now that I’m wrapping up All Horror’s review of the Psycho franchise… the time had come to check out this remake.

Turns out, it’s the same exact movie as the original Psycho. No joke. Same script, same score, same  scenes. There were a few extra artsy frames thrown in, metaphorical type stuff, but that was it.

It seems like a strange decision to have made this an exact replica as the original because it just wasn’t scary by today’s standards. Many details from the original just looked bizarre in this one. For example, in the original, drivers of cars would always exit out of the passenger side, sliding across the bench seat for some reason. Well, they did the same thing in the remake, even though cars had long ditched bench seats in favor of buckets. So sliding over would have been really tough.

Anyway, I don’t want to nitpick. I just want to say that this remake sucked and there’s no reason to watch it. If you want to see Psycho, watch Hitchcock’s Psycho. And if you want to see a modern version of Psycho, watch Psycho 4: The Beginning.