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Post by masterofallgoons on Oct 4, 2018 11:45:10 GMT
Psycho is of course brilliant. One of the best horror films ever. The second is okay but like all the sequels it pales in comparison to the first. perhaps I owe them each a rewatch. As for the remake, it's hard to fathom why after the career making success of Good Will Hunting, Gus Van Sant would derail his career just so the world could watch Norman Bates jerk off. The sequels are obviously unnecessary, and don't approach the quality of the original in any way. But the second one, for a lame cash in horror sequel of one of the best made films in history, is about as good as you could hope for. It was never going to be on par with Psycho, nobody could have expected as much. But it's entertaining enough, it actually mostly works from a story perspective, and Anthony Perkins keeps it grounded. It's not bad. The later sequels I can't comment on really. I'm not sure I've seen all of them, and if I did I don't really remember much. But my memory and feeling is that like any horror series that starts with a great film, they got worse as they went on and got tiresome. Gus Van Sant made a weird and bold choice. It may have been misguided, but that's what he does. He's an experimental filmmaker, and that film was really just a high profile experiment. Even Good Will Hunting was an experiment for him. He'd never made anything that straightforward before. The idea that he could even pull that off was not solidified. He was known for odd and contemplative art films. Hiring Gus Van Sant to make a main stream lightly comedic drama was a bit of a risk at the time. The idea was to see if a film could be nearly as good if you attempted to make it almost exactly as it was made before. The answer seems obvious now, and probably did before, but the question is an interesting one and I think it was posed for the right reasons. He's also said it was a very literal representation of what studio exec's wanted at the time, which was just to make the same movies over again because it was easier to sell a known commodity than something new and original. Luckily that has changed now and everything is original these days. |
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Post by Anonymous Andy on Oct 4, 2018 11:50:41 GMT
The original is so brilliant and masterful that it should almost be left out of this conversation entirely. Hitchcock made an accidental masterpiece and the cinematic world as we know it was forever altered.
Psycho II is a very respectable and well-executed follow-up that probably nobody expected to be even half as good as it is. We get to see Anthony Perkins explore the character further, while Meg Tilly oozes empathy. It doesn't try to re-hash what made the first film work. It's its own thing and one of the best all-time sequels in my estimation.
Psycho III get down and dirty with the slasher formula of the '80s with mixed results. Even still, highly entertaining and quotable ("You think I'm STUPID DUKE?!").
Psycho IV digs deeper into Norman's origins, serving as the predecessor to the Bates Motel series. Olivia Hussey as Norma gives me conflicted feelings each time I watch it. On one hand, she is pure beauty, on the other, her character is tangled up in mental illness so badly and she is so toxic. She plays the material with respect, and likewise, Henry Thomas makes a decent teenage Norman. The wrap around story with Perkins leaves a little to be desired, but is a nice send-off for the character/actor. An uptick in quality from III and way better than a TV movie has any right to be.
The remake serves no real purpose. I'd rather just watch the original again.
The Bates Motel TV series is probably my favorite thing to hit the small screen since Breaking Bad. Surprisingly consistent and did a good job expanding the mythology without losing the thread. It also helps that they got out before it went stale.
Never saw the Bates Motel TV movie, but I suspect I'm not missing much.
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Post by HorrorMetal on Oct 5, 2018 2:37:48 GMT
The original.
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