Mel Brooks has had his stinkers, some much worse than this (Dracula: Dead and Loving it being by far his lowest point), but this came at the end of an era of great comedic successes for him. It's only four years after Young Frankenstein, for instance, which is one of the funniest films I've ever seen. And the concept of this film, a spoof of Hitchcock films, seems like gold. There's more than a dozen well known films and a hundred well known sequences that Brooks could have parodied. For some reason, he forgets to do it through a good 75% of the film, only parodying Vertigo, Psycho, the Birds, and Marnie with one or two throw-aways to North by Northwest. They are all from late Hitchcock, and the only one I may be missing is the Jimmy Stewart version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, probably the only major Hitch film I haven't seen. But these films are only mentioned a little, besides Vertigo, which is, more or less, the basis for 90% of all the parody. There's a take off of Psycho's shower scene, some pigeons poo on Brooks, and there is a flashback near the end that seems to be parodying Marnie. None of those parodies work. Almost none of the rest of the jokes work, either. Cloris Leachman is the only person on screen who ever gets a single laugh, as Nurse Diesel, the wack-job, manly, conniving, dominatrix, but she's trying so hard that she only managed to make me laugh a couple of times. I don't even know what Madelaine Kahn is doing here, although the phone booth/obscene phone call scene was one of the couple of scenes that made me laugh. I hope Hitchcock never actually saw this. I wouldn't be so mean as to call it an insult to his films, but it certainly stands as a major embarrassment to Mel Brooks who can't even demonstrate in his direction that he understands WHY Alfred Hitchcock is "the master of suspense," as he calls him in the kindly dedication. 5/10.
Review of High Anxiety
