Rish Outfield's reviews
Don't get me started. I wish I had an hour to verbally assail this insidious mistake. If ever I have seen a useless film, it had to be this one. I thought the whole point of a remake was to look at it in a new light, with new circumstances, in a new day, with new twists. Not this way, a piece of filmmaking so worthless that the most foolhardy film student would shy away from it. They would have been better off paying Ted Turner to colourize Hitchcock's original and insert the word ‘fuck' severally into the updated version. The cast and crew made a big deal about the fact that they used the same Joseph Stefano script from the 1960 film, so the dialogue seems unnatural and forced from time to time, plus some scenes that created such tension in the Hitchcock version are only annoying here. Also, are Vince Vaughan, Anne Heche, and Julianne Moore inferior actors to Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, and Vera Miles? If not, why are their characters so flat here, so uninteresting, and uninvolving? Obviously, Van Sant is an inferior director to Hitchcock, but after seeing this, I find it difficult to think of him as a director at all. You know, I don't care if I never see another Gus Van Sant film. I don't care if no one else does, either. This movie not only displeased me, it offended me in a way that stuck, like a spitwad, for days afterward.
I'd Recommend It To: be handily disposed-of.

The tyranist's thoughts
There really aren't very many legitimate reasons to remake a movie, especially shot for shot. It just doesn't make a lot of sense. Van Sant and company always claimed that they did this because they wanted to pay tribute to Hitchcock's greatness. It doesn't work. Updating the movie (poorly I might add), making it color, and adding sound effects that were never needed or possibly intended doesn't do it for me. There are a couple of really cool shots where the color makes a difference, but other than that this one merely shows of the mediocre points of the original, without the luster that Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh brought to it. I didn't think this was abominable, but it was pretty bad. Mostly I just can't figure out why.