Editor’s Note: Freeline Media’s movie critic, Mike Fried, takes a look at two new movies that are streaming – are you up for comedy, or horror? Read on!
By MIKE FRIED
HIGH ANXIETY (HBO Max)
**** 1/2
As the story goes, before releasing this film, Mel Brooks previewed it for the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock himself. Hitch sat there, impassively watching, and when the movie was over, Hitch got up and without a word walked out of the screening room. Mel Brooks was besides himself thinking he had somehow offended Hitchcock — until a couple of days later an expensive case of wine showed up at Brooks’ office with a note that said “I wish I had made this movie.”
High praise indeed.
And it is very deserving. It’s a pure Mel Brooks movie, but it is also very much a Hitchcock film, more than any DePalma film because here it is done with intentional love. From Vertigo to The Birds to Psycho to Spellbound to the recurring Hitchcock theme of the wrongfully accused man, Mel Brooks and his coterie of writers have mined some marvelous scenes brought to life by some absolutely brilliant performances. It also spoofs James Bond, Blow-Up and Citizen Kane.
Mel Brooks’ Richard Harpo Thorndyke is the straight man in this whole piece, allowing the zanies around him to shine, especially Madeline Kahn as love interest Victoria Brisbane whose father is a patient at the Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous, and Cloris Leachman and Harvey Korman as Nurse Diesel and Dr. Charles Montague, the villains who seek to cover up their evil doing. All three of them deliver such extraordinarily hilarious performances.
But Brooks as director shines as well. You can tell he is steeped in the films of Hitchcock. Take the scene with Diesel and Montague talking to each other from a point of view under the coffee table looking up. As the nefarious dialogue progresses, Diesel and Montague place items on the glass table necessitating the camera moving several times. It is a masterful scene. And the spoofs of Psycho and The Birds are nothing short of genius.
Esteemed critics like Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby gave the movie poor reviews because they felt that Hitchcock’s films were often quite funny themselves and the purpose of a spoof was to mock something that was self-important. They are way off base. This is a Mel Brooks film, not a Hitchcock film and the best spoofs in the movie are not spoofs of the funnier among Hitchcock’s scenes but of the more tense and iconic ones. And while some of the jokes fall into the territory of the juvenile and perverse, the rest of the film works so well that it doesn’t matter at all. “I’m at Golden Gate Park. Meet me in 30 minutes at the North by Northwest corner.” Come on, that’s GOLD.
It’s my third favorite Brooks behind The Producers and Blazing Saddles.
WATCH IT !
FUN FACT: Alfred Hitchcock proposed a scene for the film in which the killer would chase Thorndyke to the harbor, where Thorndyke would try to escape by taking a running jump onto a boat in the water, only to realize the boat was pulling in to the docks. Mel Brooks loved the idea, but was unable to film it due to budget and time constraints.
BECKY (Netflix)
*** 1/2
When we first meet Becky, a sullen teen, she is being harassed by her classmates. She mourns the loss of her mother to cancer. When we first meet Dominick, a jailed neo-Nazi, he is handing off a shiv to a fellow inmate to finish off the attack on another inmate. Becky does not like the fact that her father is dating another woman who has been invited to their lake house for the weekend. Meanwhile, Dominick and some of his inmates have escaped from custody and are on the loose. Mayhem and gore occur when the two groups meet up at the lake house.
I don’t even know if I would have watched this film if I hadn’t seen that Kevin James was playing Dominick. James is unrecognizable in his role, with shaven head, Nazi tattoos on his noggin and a beard that Karl Marx would envy. Unlike the Sandman or David Spade or Rob Schneider, Kevin James once in a while makes an attempt at something different. And in this case, he hits the mark.
But don’t tune in to see James in a revelatory performance unless you are into horror, guts and gore — this is a seriously demented film. The eyeball scene alone would make Luis Bunuel vomit, although – as gory as it is — it is quite funny. This movie is a cross between Home Alone and Funny Games.
The beginning of the movie is a delight of filmmaking with both Becky’s high school tormentors mimicking that of Dominick’s jailhouse gang tormenting another prisoner. The edits between scenes are quite artistic for this genre and portend the promise of more.
Lulu Wilson, who I had never heard of before, is an actress that I think we shall hear a lot from in the future. As Becky, she is cunning, agile and as bloodthirsty as the criminals who terrorize her — if not more so. She is every bit as good as veteran Kevin James.
Robert Maillet, a former wrestler turned actor, was particularly good in this movie. As Apex, one of the escaped convicts, he uncharacteristically shows a semblance of humanity. What’s going on is too much even for him. A really fine performance.
Joel McHale is fine as Becky’s dad in a rather small role and Amanda Bruegel is fine as McHale’s fiancée.
Directors Jonathan Miliotti and Cary Murnion have made interesting movies previously — Cooties and Bushwick — and those were good movies.
This movie ups their reputation quite a bit. But this movie is all about Lulu Wilson and Kevin James.
If you like gory horror movies WATCH IT
if not, stay away.
Me? I’ll watch it again.
Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.
Contact Mike at moviemike3@yahoo.com and mike.fried@yahoo.com.
