Fortunately not as horrific as the novel extract I read

Rating: 6/10 (19 June 2008)

Many years ago I read an extract in The Age newspaper of Bret Easton-Ellis' novel "American psycho". Didn't even manage to real all of it-I found it so absolutely vile I stopped reading it and knew that I would never read that book (the extract was the literary equivalent of coming across those photos from SBS TV autopsy shows in The Age-God knows why The Age feels that a TV guide needs shots of actual autopsies-again and again). The book then and now, presumably, requires it to be wrapped in a plain brown paper bag for taking away after purchase (as it's rated R).
Anyway, the other night a commercial network here in Australia screened this movie around midnight. I PVR'd it and watched it soon afterwards. I'm assuming that it wasn't different to the cinema release.
The plot: Christian Baile plays Patrick Bateman, a corporate high-flyer in the 1980's (with a touch of the Jim Carreys about him)- a time of corporate piracy and excess. He's about to get married, or so his girlfriend thinks and the petty jealousies at work fill him with such rage that he becomes quite the nasty psycho killer (Quest que cest?). This is the kind of slasher movie which has more in common with Hitchcock's "Psycho" than Carpenter's "Halloween"-i.e. you get a fleshed out portrait of the murderer and not some automotan killing machine. As in those movies, it isn't really a gore-fest, though one or two scenes in it are not very pleasant-to do with dismemberment.
Apparently the novel was a biting satire of the excess of the times.That does come across in this movie, though I wonder if the book itself says more about the rivalry between artists (Easton Ellis) and the corporate world he seems to despise-in other words, perhaps the sickness of the novel says more about artists as a class than supposedly bad corporate raiders.
There are a couple of telling scenes in this movie where others precisely pigeon-hole Bateman and you know they've nailed his character.
Bateman is a very odd character-stylised and amusing at times.