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Title: Brooks and Hitchcock Make for a Fruitless Marriage
Review: An opaque send-up of Alfred Hitchcock's legendary suspense pictures, this probably sounded better on paper than it looks on the screen. It's to be expected for a Mel Brooks movie to be filled to the brim with cheap puns, obvious punchlines and loads of sight gags - that's part of his allure, actually - but this seems thin even by those standards. A basement-level plot might have something to do with that; beneath the dense surface of each of Brooks's best pictures lies a surprisingly rich, inherently funny basic storyline. That's missing in this dim, forced tale of good, evil and jealousy in the hallways a California psychiatric ward. If Blazing Saddles is a novella, High Anxiety is a two-page pamphlet. It's got some value, but not enough to justify a very long sitting.
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