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Mel Brooks sends up Alfred Hitchcock in High Anxiety, a spoof centered around a psychiatrist who uncovers shenanigans at 'The Psychoneurotic Institute for the Very, VERY Nervous'.  Brooks plays the shrink, a man who must cope with his own 'high anxiety' while getting to the bottom of a murder mystery before the Institute's nefarious head nurse and former administrator order him killed! Cloris Leachman and Harvey Korman are stand-outs as the villains. In one scene, you see the hunch-backed, mustached Leachman don a Nazi uniform when she lashes the bound Korman during a clandestine S&M session.

There are a few meta moments that also gave me a chuckle — especially when a camera dollies toward a window to give us a better view of the characters at a dining table. When the camera crashes through the window, it stops — and everyone turns to look at it. After an awkward moment, the camera slowly pulls away and the characters go back to their meal. The film parodies several of Hitchcock’s films, most notably Psycho, Vertigo, and The Birds. Hitchcock himself loved the movie, and counted The Birds riff as his favorite, a scene where it’s not so much the birds that terrorize Mel Brooks — it’s the bird shit.

With Madeline Kahn, Dick Van Patten, and Barry Levinson.