Just when you thought it was safe to step into the shower, they have remade Psycho. I saw the Hitchcock classic when it was first released in 1960 and yelled with the rest of the audience when Janet Leigh took 45 seconds to expire in the shower of Anthony Perkins's - sorry, Norman Bates's - motel from Hell. So I felt challenged to revisit the scene in the remake which follows the original, frame by frame.
It is the same script with lines like Norman's "A boy's best friend is his mother."
The actors are different, of course, and this time it's in colour so you see Anne Heche's blood as red. But Janet Leigh's black blood was somehow more chilling.
There were gasps when Norman's "mother" darts out of a bedroom and stabs the private investigator at the top of the stairs to the sound of the screechy violins. In 1960 the audience was roaring at this point and about three feet out of their seats.
So why remake Psycho, the critics ask. Director Gus Van Sant retorts: "Why are they asking why?"
One critic theorises that some years ago, Van Sant "accidentally destroyed a tape of Psycho in his VCR. The guilt was incredible. He couldn't face what he had done. So in his mind he became Hitchcock. He dressed like him, he talked like him . . . Finally, the Alfred half of him took over and he started making Hitchcock movies."
Others see intriguing irony in the fact that Van Sant and Heche are openly gay. "And surely it can be news to no one that there is a gay subtext in Psycho, one that was hardly suppressed in the original but now is clear to the point of obviousness," writes Walter Addiego in the San Francisco Examiner. Well, I am not so sure of that. Norman obviously likes dressing up, wearing wigs and drinking milk for dinner but we shouldn't jump to conclusions. For an Irish audience in 1960, "gay" meant the Late Late Show and lots of men drank milk.
It was clear enough Norman had a mother fixation but so did most Irish lads back then. Were we all mentally ill?
Apparently here in the US, mental health professionals believe that Psycho, more than any other film, "stigmatised mental illness for Americans." This is why a US senator, who is an advocate for the rights of the mentally disabled, asked Universal Pictures to have the remake include a preface noting the great strides in treating the mentally ill since 1960. He was turned down.
The critics generally panned the original when it came out. The New York Times called Hitchcock's film "a blot on an honourable career".
This week the same newspaper called the original "one of the most influential and carefully analysed movies ever made," but called Van Sant's effort "an odd enterprise".
Now the critics are at it again. The Wall Street Journal calls the remake a "flat, boring, stupid movie". Poor Vince Vaughan as Norman is described as giving the "worst performance of the year". And worse of all: "The power of the shower is kaput."
And it was "power" back in 1960. It took Hitchcock seven days and 70 camera set-ups to get it right and even though most people were convinced they saw Ms Leigh being hacked to death, this was because of the skilful editing. You never saw that kitchen knife actually plunging into defenceless flesh but you imagined it.
And taking a shower has never really been the same since. How any American woman can do it in seedy motels beats me. As one critic said this week: "When Anne Heche undresses in that creepy motel, you wonder why she doesn't remember the original movie."
A woman wrote to Hitchcock saying that her daughter had stopped taking baths after the drowning scene in Les Diaboliques and now after Psycho she was refusing to take showers. What was the mother to do? "Have her dry-cleaned," replied the master.
Hitchcock told fellow director Francois Truffaut he thought he could "have fun" making Psycho. He took on the challenge of making a cheap horror movie which would be technically brilliant. It was cheap alright - $800,000 - and went on to make over $40 million.
Janet Leigh was paid $40,000 instead of her usual $100,000 but then she was dead a third of the way through the movie.
Perkins got the same money, which seems unfair as he played two parts - I won't reveal the second one and spoil it for young viewers.
As for the oldies, go and wallow in 1960s nostalgia. A Mr Steven Weisman tells us in the New York Times that the first Psycho "effectively proclaimed the end of the buttoned-up 1950s". Get unbuttoned again, lads.
