HOMICIDAL VS. PSYCHO

With due respect, I disagree -- for me.

If you wish to read, I post on it elsewhere here: "People,People!" is the title.

I saw both these movies in the theater in 1961. I was 5 years old. I have not seen Homicidal since then but both moview were scared into me and I had nightmares for several months. PSYCO for me is the better movie.

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I liked Homicidal better as well. In fact, I loved it so much, I've seen it many times over the years!

Well... Psycho is brilliant, and groundbreaking, and honestly changed cinema. It's irreplaceable. But the problem with Psycho for me -- which is not a problem in its making, certainly, but only in my viewing of it -- is that it's SO big that all its plot twists and innovations have been completely internalized by the culture, and had been before I was born. The shock of the murder scenes, and the details of the plot, were so well known that I knew all about them years before I was old enough to watch the movie, so it held few surprises for me. The great thing about all the Psycho ripoffs in the 60s, especially, of course, the well-made ones like Homicidal, is that they give you a taste of what a first, unadulterated, unspoiled viewing of Psycho might have been like. This movie, Strait-Jacket, Dementia-13... I will never get to see Psycho for the first time without having its major plot points memorized going into it, but I can get a taste of it with movies like this. Plus, of course, the best of them, like Homicidal, are great movies in their own right.


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Funny about HOMICIDAL...

For a Castle picture, it's at least a valid B-movie (while most of his stuff is C or D). It's more polished than his other directorial work, and garners a higher IMDb rating, too.

But the irony in his obvious and unmitigated imitation of PSYCHO is that Hitchcock made PSYCHO to begin with because of William Castle! Hitch saw that Castle's movies were doing well at the box office, but weren't very good. So he wondered what a film like that might be like if someone good (i.e., himself) made it. Hence, PSYCHO... And then Castle sees PSYCHO and copies it with HOMICIDAL.

So you have the imitator imitating the imitation of the imitator: Castle copying Hitchcock copying Castle copying Hitchcock! But you can't really even call it a "rip-off" of PSYCHO; it's more of an homage, being so similar and coming out the very next year.

Of course, it's stupid, the film. But I rather "like" it. In an odd way, it's actually one of Castle's most polished -- well, comparatively -- films. And if anything, it's slightly creepier than PSYCHO, perhaps because of its downmarket elements.


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The most profound of sin is tragedy unremembered.

I actually like this movie better, because the cross dressing makes a lot more sense and is more plausible than the psychobabble presented in Psycho. Psycho almost feels like the type of movie Ed Wood would've made had he had the budget. It even ended like Glen or Glenda, with the obnoxious expository dialogue explaining Norman's condition in a very patronizing way, as if the audience was five years old.

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