The Argument: Rob Zombie and Michael Bay may be the first names to come to mind when thinking of pointless remakes of horror classics, but up there with them has to be arthouse director Gus Van Sant. Following Good Will Hunting, Van Sant took upon himself one of the strangest film projects of all time; a shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's genre-defining Psycho. It's exactly as it sounds; a modern day repeat of the original in colour. Psycho '98 makes the odd good decision (the green opening titles make you literally see red), but is mostly viewed as totally unnecessary. Some people, however, would like to argue that was the point; it wasn't a proper film at all, but a cinematic experiment. Why It Doesn't Work: The film did show that total retreads of films don't work - the shower scene is limp and unaffecting - but it doesn't appear like that was the intention. In the years since release Van Sant has made various claims about the intention of the project (it was meant to get a new generation curious about the classic film; he only made it so no-one else could do a bad job of it), which only goes to show there was no real point to this alleged experiment. It's also worth noting there were some divergences from Hitchcock's film, weakening the argument further; Norman now masturbates over Marion undressing and the murder scenes are intercut with shots of clouds, masked women and other pretentious tat.
