Ammon and Pete celebrate the 60th Anniversary of Psycho, with a commentary. Catch up with Ammon, as we discuss all things Halloween, Psycho sequels, Psycho remake, etc… Enjoy!
This week we’re talking about The 1980 Brian De Palma film Dressed To Kill:
TM returns alongside Alyx and Jack to break down the erotic (eww) thriller. What does this have in common with Blow Out, what sort of themes are at play here and does the film still hold up? Most of all, are the guys happy that they had to do this Movie Homework?
All this and whether or not Sampson is a cross-dresser, so download now!
Be sure to tune in next time as we watch The Untouchables:
I love decorating my house for Halloween. I start promptly as close to October 1st as possible, or just slightly before, to ensure that Halloween is in full effect for the entire month of October. While some people may stop at hanging up a few Jack-O-Lantern cut-outs on the walls, or decking out their mantle with spider webs, skulls, pumpkins, and other spooky paraphernalia, I take it one step further by doing all that, plus decking out the outside of the house as well. I take pride in making my house the spookiest, most Halloween-decorated house in the neighbor. To do this, I put up a few strings of orange lights, a graveyard, a few human skulls, a couple of creepy-ass looking scarecrows, and couple of three ghosts/ghouls/demons that just ‘hang out’ in the yard all month long. Because I have three kids under the age of 7, the yard is part super-scary, part kiddie-friendly, with friendly skeletons coming up from beyond the grave, and silly sayings like ‘Enter If You Dare’, which doesn’t sound silly, but the sign is. Trust me.
People stop to check out the yard every time they walk by it. Kids are freaked out and don’t want to walk by the house and are therefore forced to run as fast as they can. My kid’s friends don’t want to come to the front door. Basically, that’s all I need to make it worth it. Best of all is the kids who then start asking their parents why they don’t decorate their house for Halloween. Good fucking question, yo! Get on that shit, that’s what I say. And you know what, the amount of decorated houses for Halloween in my neighborhood as doubled every year we’ve been there (this is Halloween season 3 on this block), and that is all the confirmation I need that people dig it… and it’s nice to have other spooky houses to oooh and aaah over throughout the season. My only hope is that someday, there are as many Halloween houses around as there are come Christmas time (and just you wait to see my yard then!).
Speaking of Halloween, I’m loving the horror movie season this year more than any year previous–this year I’m trying to veer away from the crap and sticking strictly with the quality horror, making my month of movie watching 1 billion times better than Jim Law’s 101 Damnations. I’m taking in all kinds of classics–some of which I’ve seen, some of which I’ve never seen before, and I’m loving every second of it. At Day 9 of October, I’ve taken in Psycho, The Birds, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (on Blu-ray!), Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, Scream, a few episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Eaten Alive, Creepshow, Cabin Fever: Patient Zero, The Town That Dreaded Sundown (original), Horns, Gone Girl, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (with Donald Sutherland), House of Wax (original), 28 Days Later, and The Baby. And I’d recommend all of them… except Cabin Fever: Patient Zero, cause that one sucked (but it has a good catfight towards the end). I’ll be checking out even more as the weeks go on, including Night of the Demons, a flick that I’ve surprisingly never seen before.
On the TV side, American Horror Story: Freakshow starts this week, as does The Walking Dead. After wrapping up the shitastic The Strain this week, I’m looking forward to some quality horror on TV. Let’s hope these two delivery. Yes, Walking Dead has let me down in the past, but what can I say… I’m an optimist about this season. And AHS: Freakshow just looks awesome. Love that show. Old shit like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and The Munsters will also be in the loop all month long to get into the holiday season. Sons of Anarchy is still awesome and is, by far, the one show I look forward to the most week after week.
And because I need one more source of horror in my life, I’m currently reading Bram Stoker’s DRACULA. While much more dense than, say, FRANKENSTEIN, it’s still a pleasure to read, and perfect for the season. The whole thing is drenched with a gothic atmosphere that’s so damn thick you can practically cut it with a knife. Hopefully I can time it right so I’m reading THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW during the last week of the month, leading up to Halloween. That’s a Halloween tradition I always take on as the story of the Headless Horseman is a staple of Halloween for me. So fucking cool.
The Lowdown: Some chick steals some dough from her work, tries to get away with it, and meets a creepy motel owner who likes to fix people sandwiches in his dead animal room. Surprises ensue.
The Breakdown (Spoilers): Classic, atmospheric, creepy and unique are all great ways to define Psycho, arguably Alfred Hitchcock’s most popular film. For the time it was made it was innovative, fresh and terrifying, and I’m very happy to say it still holds up today. From the early “viral” marketing for the film to the misdirection in the casting, Psycho separates itself from the pack by retaining originality in the genre, showing us things that had never been seen in a movie before, and defying the expectations of thriller fans everywhere.
From a technical perspective, you would be hard pressed to find a misstep throughout the runtime. The shower sequence is the stuff of cinema legend but the whole film has a level of polish and quality that was rare for the time it was made. Anthony Perkins is, quite simply, magnetic as Norman Bates. Essentially Perkins runs a clinic on the creepy boy next door role, infusing Bates with charm, wit and uneasiness from the moment he is introduced. He plays the type of character that makes you feel something is…off about him, but you can not quite place what it is. From his taxidermic hobby to his clear connection to his mother, Norman Bates comes off as a very sick individual, and one that has endured all the way to today, some fifty-years on.
The cinematography is, to put it lightly, awe-inspiring. From simple close-ups of a peeping tom to a brilliantly shot chase sequence involving a police officer, every frame looks good. Hitchcock, with the help of cinematographer John Russell, does an excellent job at keeping the audience, and the camera, at arms length for most of the film, never revealing the true nature of Norman’s mother until the end of the film, and it works magnificently. The shot of Martin Balsam climbing the stairs of the Bates mansion with the camera positioned overhead is chilling because of how cold the shot is. You literally see a man walking up the stairs with plenty of light everywhere, when from the left of the frame a door opens and the killer emerges, knife in hand, ready to pounce. It may strike some as a lazy shot but I find it to be brutally horrifying and a real standout in a film full of great shots.
Movie scores do not get much better than the one in Psycho. While it has been parodied and imitated endlessly since the film was released, the high strings and melody of the music still makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. While I have heard it called distracting, Psycho’s score is a brilliantly irritating piece of music that immediately stresses you out and ramps up the tension in a given scene. While the editing is often the main focus of the shower sequence I could not imagine watching that scene without those piercing strings. It does all the right things in terms of creating a very specific and difficult mental state in the mind of the viewer and plays with you on a subconscious level that adds to the films’ terror.
The Comedown: There is a certain collection of films that defy criticism. Psycho is one of those. From its foothold on the “crazy-son-with-mommy-issues” genre to the innovation in every aspect of filmmaking, Psycho is a titan of the genre and one that gets plenty of respect from new generations all the time. While this rarely gets on peoples’ must-see Halloween films, I had to give it its due, mainly out of respect.
The were definately some close match-ups in the first round but only one I consider a true upset. PSYCHO beating THE USUAL SUSPECTS was a complete surprise to me and I would never have predicted Hitchcock classic moving into the second round. So here we have it, the Sweet 16 is set and will be open for voting tomorrow (Tuesday, Aug 27). There will be two match-ups a day with voting ending on all matches this Saturday, Aug 31. Take a gander at the bracket below and get ready for some more epic battles.
After the disaster that was Gus van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of PSYCHO back in 1998, it’s surprising that some 15 years later a TV exec somewhere would say “you know what would make for a great new TV series? A prequel to the events of PSYCHO starring Norman Bates and his mother.” And yet that seems to be how the shit went down, and now that the 10 episode first season of BATES MOTEL just wrapped, it appears that TV exec was right. That cheeky fucker.
A&E’s BATES MOTEL has made Monday nights all the more fun and entertaining, delivering a solid hour of darkly comic entertainment, and doing a bang-up job keeping me thirsty for more each and every week. Vera Farmiga is smokin’ hot as Norma Bates (hot and batshit crazy), and Freddie Highmore was perfectly cast as the high school version of Norman. He has the right look, the right demeanor, and just the right acting chops to pull it off, and he did so extremely well. Let’s face it, if Norman was a total jerk-off, the show wouldn’t be worth watching.
As a mid-season replacement for some shit or another, BATES MOTEL covered a lot of ground…. Here are the highlights:
The town where the newly established Bates Motel resides in is just about as crazy as any other character on the show. The town isn’t supernatural or anything off the wall like that, but there’s this unique sense about it that I dug.
The production design is very timeless, in that it can be hard to actually tell what fuckin’ era this show is supposed to take place. At first, it feels like the ‘40s or ‘50s, just about the time this would have taken place if it were a true prequel to PSYCHO, but then kids are on their iPhones and there are HDTVs hanging on the walls, not to mention the cars on the street. But the look of the motel, the design of the Bates house lurking above the motel, and the style of Norma and Norman are very timeless, whereas everyone else is very 2013. A unique choice for sure, and one that works well for the show.
All the chicks in town want to fuck Norman. And the hottest chick in town actually does fuck Norman. Sure, it was a pity fuck, a but a fuck’s a fuck, right? The town “dork” who is also hella hot underneath her oxygen tubes and matching tank also wants Norman’s cock, but he’s too hung up on the other slut to notice. His English teacher also wants some Norman dick inside her, and let’s not forget the incestual relationship between Norman and his mom. The dude may look and appear and be the biggest loner in the history of characters, but that doesn’t mean the ladies don’t want his meat. They want it… bad.
I mentioned weed earlier, but there’s a ton of weed in this sleepy Oregon town, so much so that Norman’s half-brother Max Thierot has a job sitting around in a tent looking after the crops day in and day out. And there’s also dudes driving down the street on fire when said job of watching the crops isn’t done well. Weed’s a serious business… that’s what I’ve learned from BATES MOTEL.
Also, human trafficking is also a serious business, and there’s a whole storyline going on there that goes to some pretty fuckin’ dark places surrounding human trafficking, keeping young Asian women captive, selling them on the black market, and using the Hotel and members of the police force to make it happen. It’s even more fucked up that then whole mother/son relationship going on between the Norman/Norma’s.
Norma is one crazy bitch when she wants to be. Biopolar would probably be a better way to put it, as she’ll be Betty Crocker one minute and a psychotic crazy lady the next. Farmiga is great with pulling both of her manic personalities off, and you know what? She can be pretty funny, too.
Norman’s crazy ways are set up quite well with his bouts of blacking out and doing crazy shit sprinkled through various episodes, followed by his recent obsession with taxidermy. The dude taxidermis a stray dog he falls in love with after knowing it for 20 minutes. That’s some crazy shit right there.
The supporting cast is great, especially Nestor Carbonell, who plays Sheriff Romero (nice genre nod there!). He’s a tough guy who keeps things straight and narrow… and he really knows how to wear eyeliner. But fuck, even with the eyeliner, the guy is a total badass… but one where you’re not entirely sure where he stands with the Bates’ and all the crazy shit they’ve gotten themselves into so soon after arriving in town. He ends up being the hero at the end of Season One, and I couldn’t have been happier about it.
So what’s the verdict with BATES MOTEL? After one season of only 10 episodes, I’m hooked on the show and can’t wait for more when Season 2 starts (in the fall?). Season 1 ends on a nice little cliffhanger, promising more “classic” crazy shit coming from the Bates household. Plus, I gotta find out if his brother ends up nailing the town whore (Nicola Peltz), if Norman will finally play hide the salami with Emma (Olivia Cooke), will the entire town start to like Norma again or is she a lost cause and forever known as the “crazy lady at the Bates Motel”, and most importantly, how do the events of the season finale affect the lives of our favorite incestual mother/son duo? If you have a chance to check this out before Season 2 starts, I highly recommend it… it’s a great homage to the world Alfred Hitchcock created, yet it’s also its own thing, both of which work well together, surprisingly enough.