I watched this on Tuesday night, while The Wife was off ransacking the local Pottery Barn Kids for clearance-priced junk to peddle to yuppies on eBay. It's a minor Mel Brooks movie that I hadn't seen in ages -- and which I didn't remember well at all; I'd thought Brooks' character was an impostor (was I remembering some other movie?)Anyway, High Anxiety is the Hitchcock parody movie; it has a few good set-pieces (especially the shower stabbing), but it lets most of its jokes run on a bit too long. Chloris Leachman is the best thing in it, as the sadistic (and I mean that literally) Nurse Diesel. The rest of the cast is made up of the usual Brooks regulars -- Harvey Korman, Ron Carey, Madeleine Kahn, and so on. And you can probably guess what their characters are like without seeing the movie. And it has that '70s, pre-Airplane comedy style of doing a joke, and letting some time pass (to allow for the laugh) before anything else happens.
I'm not sorry I saw it again, but I could probably go another twenty years before seeing it for the third time.
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