Heche, along with Julianne Moore as her no-nonsense sister and William H. The new ''Psycho'' begins promisingly with bold green added to the Saul Bass title sequence, a fuller sound to Bernard Herrmann's unforgettable theme music (re-recorded by Danny Elfman) and Anne Heche refreshingly cast in Marion's role. Norman, an amateur taxidermist, has one scary mom watching all this from her perch atop a hill. Three other characters (Marion's sister, lover and a private detective) begin investigating Marion's disappearance. Then he has an even more disturbing effect on her. Eager to hide, Marion checks into a remote motel and winds up having a powerfully disturbing effect on the proprietor. So she absconds with a pile of cash that has literally landed in her lap. A secretary named Marion Crane (originally Janet Leigh) has a lover who won't marry her for financial reasons. If the filmmaker is right in supposing that ''Psycho'' is most widely remembered as that scary shower movie, here's a brief reminder. Those of us not quite ready to write off the first film will gain little from learning that Norman keeps porn magazines and toy soldiers in his once off-limits childhood bedroom. His film is an artful, good-looking remake (a modest term, but it beats plagiarism) that shrewdly revitalizes the aspects of the real ''Psycho'' (1960) that it follows most faithfully but seldom diverges seriously or successfully from one of the cinema's most brilliant blueprints. If he isn't Hitchcock, neither is he crazy.
![the movie psycho 1998 the movie psycho 1998](https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/notebook/post_images/28879/images-w1400.jpg)
Anyway, the film's main suspense revolved around a single question: now that room rent at the Bates Motel is up to $36.50, what else is new? Today's audiences can traipse freely, and at the theater I attended somebody even made a loud cellular phone call just as the rest of us were bracing ourselves for the shower scene. There was a time when no one could enter a theater playing ''Psycho'' after the film had started.
![the movie psycho 1998 the movie psycho 1998](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/Gr8AAOSwk2lfqrYd/s-l400.jpg)
Gus Van Sant's new color replica of ''Psycho'' opened without advance screenings yesterday, adopting Alfred Hitchcock's policy of dodging reviews but neglecting some of his other, even better marketing ideas.