Movie: Psycho (spoilers)

I don't really have to worry about spoiling "Psycho", do I? I mean, even if you've never seen it, you know the deal with Norman Bates and his mother, right? 'Cause I'm going to assume you do, or you don't really care anyway.

I've tried to give Alfred Hitchcock the benefit of the doubt. I've watched his early stuff, I've watched his later stuff, I've watched stuff with actors I know I love, I've watched his spy movies, I've watched his horror movies. I really think I have been more than fair with giving him a chance to live up to his reputation. And at this point, I really think he's overblown. I just am not at all impressed with Alfred Hitchcock's work.

So, Psycho. Supposedly one of his greats. Some people would even call it his magnum opus. (We usually refer to those as "mean" people.) So widely parodied that even if you've never seen it, the words "Bates Motel" trigger an "Oh crap" and odds are you know the deal with Norman and his mother.

So, never seen it, decided to watch it.

One of the supposedly innovative aspects of this movie is the sudden change halfway through. We're watching Janet Leigh for an hour, and then her character up and gets killed and we have to go find another protagonist somewhere else. OMG, no one's done this before and it's so unexpected and innovative and creative.
Uh huh. May I politely suggest that there's a reason no one else before or since has tried to pull a stunt like this?

To me, it doesn't come across as innovative; it comes across as bad pacing. Let's review what takes up the first half of the movie. Janet Leigh parades around in her underwear, steals a buttload of money, goes to hook up with her boyfriend, has a change of heart and decides to go back, and takes a shower. This should take 20 minutes, half hour tops.

Worse yet, this is not the worst of the pacing problems by far, but I'll get to that in a moment. First, the shower scene. The famous shower scene, regarded as one of the most terrifying moments in cinematic history.

For a moment, forget Psycho, and just imagine a really good horror movie murder-in-the-shower scene. And just to up the ante, I'm taking away the last 50 years of special effects technology, so imagine a really good horror movie shower scene murder in an era that doesn't have the ability to show realistic wounds at all, much less in the process of being made. Think about what that would look like.
Odds are, it includes a quick cut, doesn't it? Maybe shows one horrific injury, maybe not even that. Maybe just cuts away on the downstroke. Right?

Not this. The shower scene is 3 full minutes from water on to life gone, and features an attack with a knife that is obviously fake and woman that is obviously not dying. There's even a very nice, relatively long shot of this rubber knife sliding across her tummy, obviously fake.
Quite frankly, this scene is far more disturbing for its rather masturbatory nature and what it says about the people making it and the people they intended to watch it, than it is as a horror movie moment. Norman and his rubber knife are not scary; some man thinking this would be thrilling to watch for 3 whole minutes, that is scary.

So, she's dead. Back to pacing problems. Am I correct in thinking that if we show Norman putting the body in the back of a car, we will all assume he is cleaning up and hiding the mess? No, not Alfred. He shows us every second of Norman cleaning the bathroom, in real time. We spend at least 5 and maybe even 10 minutes watching a man clean a bathroom. I realize this just didn't happen in 1960, so maybe he just was afraid people wouldn't believe a man cleaning a bathroom if he didn't show the whole damn thing. "How can Norman's mother be dead? Who cleaned the bathroom?"
Come on! I'm sorry, but mopping is not exciting cinema, I don't care how much chocolate syrup you've splashed or where you've splashed it.

Then there's the ending. It's painfully obvious that The Three Faces of Eve was recently published (1957). This multiple personality thing is new and exciting enough to play with, but Alfred can't assume the audience is going to know about it. So, we get a nice long boring talky clinical BS-ing scene for the majority of our denouement. This is good, because after all that mopping I could really use a breather. :P

Summary: not impressed. In fact, I need to go to my Netflix queue and clean off any more Hitchcock movies. They just never get any better.