Word: psycho
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...American Psycho, scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster in January, runs 362 pages in edited manuscript. Crawls, actually. Barely distinguishable chapters are stuffed with the brand names of expensive suits, shoes and wristwatches, endless spoofs of nightclubs and restaurants and rambling reviews of pop records. The litany of the trivial is intentional, though Ellis seems to be writing for people who take forever to get the point. Instead of a plot, there is a tapeworm narrative that makes it unnecessary to distinguish the beginning of the novel from...
PACIFIC HEIGHTS. Weirdo Michael Keaton squats in a house and tries to drive the nice couple who own it crazy. Sound like Beetlejuice II? Not quite: this thriller concentrates on turning familiar fears into plausible melodrama. The result is one of the slickest haunted-house movies since Psycho...
Bret Easton Ellis, author of Less Than Zero and a leader of Manhattan's literary brat pack, has a novel due out next February that is already causing controversy. Staff members at Simon & Schuster who have read the manuscript, titled American Psycho, say it chronicles a young Wall Street banker who is involved in sexual perversities, murders, mutilations and diverse other grotesqueries and degradations. Robert Asahina, Ellis' editor, allows, "It is a book that can be at times upsetting to read." Some are so upset that they have balked at working on the novel. But Ellis has his defenders...
Arachnophobia is given extra dimension by borrowing yet another technique made famous by Hitchcock. In Psycho and Rebecca, Hitchcock explored the results of placing psychologically-burdened characters under severe stress, forcing them to confront their worst fears. Jennings' extreme fear of spiders effectively establishes the link with the audience which makes the ensuing action tenable. Jennings' fear is believeble because, thanks to Marshall's careful direction, the character himself is so wholely believeable...
...wrote Blazing Saddles) is evident in his direction of a series of suspense-ridden false alarms. He keeps the audience off-balance by allowing it at times to come away with a laugh when expecting another gruesome killing. A typical example is the shower scene, an obvious allusion to Psycho, which comes to a far more humourous conclusion than Hitchcock's version...