Word: psychos
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MIDNITE FRI-SAT: Cinema I, Psycho, Cinema II, The Gang's All Here...
...moneymakers usually encourage quick, cheap, and successive imitation. In the sixties, the youth film and the tepid sex/promiscuity film became the obvious examples of such industry-wide stagnation. More elusive, perhaps, was the much wider range of films which merged violence with psychodrama after the model of Hitchcock's Psycho -- formula films where violence was often the only substance, films that Hitchcock wouldn't even deign to sneeze at. Exploiters like Strait-Jacket, the 1964 axe-murder movie, led later to box-office hits like The Boston Strangler (still playing in Boston drive-ins today), and also to superfluous...
...contrast to the more obvious cases, Sisters is an imitation come long after its wave has passed. As a result, Brian De Palma's film can hide its imitation of both Psycho and the exploiters of Psycho behind the more artistically acceptable term homage. De Palma thinks of his film in terms of homage, so Sisters is far more discouraging than a typical bandwagon exploiter. It deceives even the film maker -- a potentially good film maker at that. De Palma tries hard to lose his style amidst Hitchcock's. Fortunately, he doesn't succeed: his film still includes sections that...
...into public, with murderous consequences (Vertigo). There are innocent bystanders drawn dangerously into a closely woven criminal web (The Man Who Knew Too Much). Even the murder that is the film's central incident-a perhaps too ghastly knifing-reminds us of the famous shower-bath murder in Psycho, as does a splendid, spooky score by that film's masterful composer, Bernard Herrmann. More important than these specific references to glories past, however, is the Hitchcockian discipline De Palma brings to his storytelling, the delicate balance between humor and horror with which he permits it to unfold...
...Conformist, Bertolucci explored the personal life of a fascist, flirting with psycho-history. But his film argues the connection between sexual repression and fascism even less clearly than the novel by Alberto Moravia on which it was based. So the psychology of the characters become subordinate to the suspense and aesthetic ebullience which carried the film...