Word: psycho
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...patients. Our control of the effects of cancer on the body and psyche has made treatment more tolerable for millions. Technology is fighting the war against nausea, vomiting, pain and appetite loss with new and different medications, portable infusion pumps and patches delivering medications through the skin. Specialists in psycho-oncology help patients handle the stresses of the disease. Cancer is not necessarily a death sentence. Its treatment can be more easily endured until the day that the science of genetics may prevent it entirely...
...have a question for you: have you ever seen this film on the big screen? like every old film, "Psycho" is only available on videocassette, a format that gets about as close to the experience of seeing a film in a theatre as a tenth generation cassette gets to live performance. Do you remember the scene when Lila approaches the Bates mansion? The picture cuts from her to the house; then to Lila, a little closer; then to the house, a little bigger; then to Lila, almost at the porch...but on your cruddy TV the effect of that ominous...
...course, a movie like "Psycho" still freaks you out even in a well-lit living room with the remote control safely in hand. It manages to maintain suspense from the opening scene until the end (with one notable exception)--something that no one, Hitchcock included, has been able to do before or since. This feat is accomplished by multiple layers of suspense via different plot structures, For the first half hour of the film we do not even meet Norman Bates or his mother: the plot concerns a woman, Marion Crane, who steals forty thousand dollars from her boss...
Unfortunately I can't delve too much further into the plot, for the sake of the few of you who haven't seen "Psycho." The twists of this story--in particular, one final twist--are so shocking and bewildering that Hitchcock felt the need to include a scene with a shrink to explain it all at the end. This is the one scene where the suspense, held so masterfully up until this point (and afterwards in Norman's final soliloquy), breaks. Some silly guy swings his finger around and ties it all up nicely for us. But keep in mind...
...hard to review a film that has achieved the status of classic so deservedly: all I can say is, don't miss your chance to see the mother of all thrillers on the big screen. It "Psycho" in the theatre leaves you cold, well, there's something wrong with you. And if it scares you so much that you can't sleep for weeks, well, don't say I didn't warn you, Mother...