F#ck Psycho

Rating: 6/10 (5 April 2015)

Hitchcock may be one of the greats, but that's no excuse for doing sub par work and making a half-good movie. You can't do that, man. What reasons do I have for assaulting a classic? It's 1 in the morning, I'm not wearing pants, I have insomnia as a result of depression, and I thought that Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece make-you-wet-your-adult- diaper thriller was a load of horse manure.
I first saw Psycho with my family one Halloween. I expected what the DVD case said: a thriller. What I got was not much in return. The story follows Marion Something who decides to rob her perfectly nice boss and go on the run with the money. Why? Doesn't matter. She is then pursued by a theorizing cop for a wholesome round of filler suspense. I wasn't embroiled in her life. I was bored. She then stops at a motel and after a long bout of small talk with the creepy care-taker, is murdered. I haven't marked this as a spoiler because it isn't one. It barely happens halfway through.
I don't give a flying, enchanted sh!t about shocking the audience if it removes the stupid main character from the stupid movie. The rest of the movie is a detective (about whom I saw no reason to care) looking into Marion's disappearance and ultimately the wacky misadventures of Marion's sister and Marion's butt buddy Sam. THIS WEBSITE lists Marion as fourth in the cast and I'm expected to pay attention. I found myself disengaged from the story. I blame the screenplay. Upon closer inspection and after a second, forced viewing in film class, I saw that there was still three-act structure and an antagonist. There's even the first conflict between the protagonist and primary opposition at the middle as Dan Decker states in Anatomy of a Screenplay. I was still not interested and a movie can be uninteresting if it follows some of the rules. Ask yourself this: how much is actually known about Marion, Lila, or Sam?
Psycho was expertly directed, shot, and edited. The shower scene lived up to its expectations. The ending was creepy and plot-twisty enough for me. But for all that, I still found that I didn't care. I hated this movie and the positive qualities didn't come up past the area that failed and is most important to me: story.