"Mother Knows Best!"

Rating: 8/10 (29 March 2013)

Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles and John Gavin star in Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 thriller based on the novel. This begins one afternoon in Phoenix, Arizona where we meet woman, Marion Crane (Leigh) and her boyfriend, Sam Loomis (Gavin). Marion is a bank teller who decides to take a great sum of money from a very important client & friend of her boss in order to help Sam pay his debts. She runs away and drives until she checks into an isolated motel owned by mild-mannered young man, Norman Bates (Perkins) who lives with his ill mother. After Norman confides in Marion, she's brutally murdered in her motel room. Miles plays her sister, Lila who eventually meets Sam and together they learn what she's done and try to find her. The answers lie in wait when they go to the Bates motel and discover the truth about Norman and his mother. This classic forever changed the way we take showers and has inspired many slasher films such as John Carpenter's "Halloween" where the kitchen knife, the name, Sam Loomis and Leigh's daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis were used to pay homage. It's definitely Hitchcock's signature film featuring a good cast & excellent score by Bernard Herrmann. I recommend this.