High Anxiety (1977) - 6/10

The movie I decided to check out this afternoon was Mel Brook's High Anxiety, a similar type of comedy to his previous films which follows the director surviving the parodies of various Alfred Hitchcock films while running around trying to solve a murder mystery. With direct scenes making fun of Psycho, North By Northwest, The Birds, and Vertigo, this movie really wasn't that funny to me for some reason either because it's so dated or the fact that I just don't like parodies like this when the originals are so much better. Mel Brooks himself is easy to recognize and some of the jokes like birds attacking him with poop or when a bellhop attacks him in the shower with a newspaper were somewhat enjoyable yet I found myself hating most of the secondary characters and production design. With movies like Blazing Saddles and even Robin Hood Men In Tights, there are far better movies out there from Mel Brooks that I would recommend checking out. High Anxiety just tried to hard to stick every cliche and famous scene from Hitchcock's films into one long string of set pieces with no single narrative structure to fall back on. Overall, I'm hesistant to say this is a bad movie but glad we have better comedies coming out nowadays that I didn't have to live when this came out.