You've got to give Gus Van Sant credit. No other filmmaker with as much indie and commercial credit as he had in 1997 would risk throwing it all away on some cockamamie idea like remaking Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 classic Psycho. Not only that, but he lived to direct another day, and actually went on to helm some pretty terrific movies (Paranoid Park, Milk). Of course, none of this excuses this weird excursion into personal cinematic self-gratification. Even with its surreal shot-for-shot sense of recreation, what we wind up with here is hubris meshed with an affront to every genre fan's sense of propriety.

The story should sound familiar: After stealing several thousand dollars from her real estate employer, Marion Crane (Anne Heche) leaves town. She hopes the money will help jumpstart a new life with deep in debt boyfriend Sam Loomis (Viggo Mortensen). While on the road, a horrific storm breaks out, and Marion is forced to seek shelter at a little, out-of-the-way roadside inn called the Bates Motel. Run by dominated mother's boy Norman Bates (Vince Vaughn), the stay gives our heroine a chance to reconsider her crime. When she fails to turn up at work the following Monday, and remains missing for nearly a week, her sister Lila (Julianne Moore) gets in touch with Sam. They hire detective Milton Arbogast (William H. Macy) to investigate. What he uncovers will both shock and terrify everyone involved.

There is something wrong with the state of film when you can type in the name of Hitchcock's black and white homage to independent B-movies and come up with two competing references. One, of course, belongs to the ages. The other belongs in a landfill somewhere outside of Studio City. It's not because of incompetence -- Van Sant has enough skill to expertly copy the calculated storyboards of the old school auteur, and his cast appears to be up to the task. Even Vaughn tries to avoid the firestorm to follow by making Bates less of a wimp and more of a wily borderline Voorhees. But that still doesn't make things right -- not artistically, not intellectually, not commercially. Unless you're going to actually remake the material, giving it your own independent spin, why simply recreate?

The answer, sadly, is nowhere to be found in this mess. This is an experience bereft of energy, a suspense thriller where you know everything that's going to happen beforehand because it's been cemented in motion picture history for nearly four decades. There's no shock in Marion's eventual death (Van Sant's version is a tad more graphic), no real mystery as to who "Mother" might be. As the story goes along, there are the exact same beats and narrative twists. We aren't magically transported into a world of moral imbalance and psychological intrigue. Instead, we keep wondering who's next on the Hollywood A-list to show up and shed their dignity to get a decent sized paycheck and a shot at gimmick-oriented macabre immortality.

It's been said that Van Sant decided to make this movie because, some 38 years after the original, few from the current generation have had the chance to experience Hitchcock's vision. Apparently, recasting it with modern technology provides an opportunity wholly different than driving down to your local video store and renting the real thing. In fact, it takes a special kind of insanity to believe that replicating a movie delivers something similar to the original. It's the same sort of madness that led some studio suits to believe it would actually make money. It bears repeating that Gus Van Sant's Psycho is not a festering flop. It is, however, wholly unnecessary.