Stylized angles, hyper-dramatic music (some diegetic, some non-diegetic), and various psychoses feature prominently in Mel Brooks' take on Hitchcock. Brooks fits in dozens of references to the Master of Suspense's movies, but High Anxiety doesn't reach the brilliance of Brooks' earlier parodies.
The blame for this relative failure rests with the screenplay written by the team of Mel Brooks, Ron Clark (Silent Movie, Revenge of the Pink Panther, The Smother Brothers Comedy Hour), Barry Levinson (Silent Movie, Diner, and director of a few relatively-unknown films) and Rudy De Luca (Silent Movie, Dracula: Dead and Loving It). Brooks' strongest work - Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles - comes from hanging the tropes of a genre on a novel idea (The Frankenstein family legacy, a hero fighting injustice in a less-rosy version of the Old West), immersing us in the look and feel of earlier films while mining the genre's cliches for laughs. Here, the writers basically remake Spellbound and sprinkle in a variety of Hitchcock's "wrong man" films, hoping that will suffice. Despite the opening credits' dedication to Hitchcock and countless winks to his filmography, High Anxiety fails to capture any of the nerve-crushing suspense or sense of guilt that made the source films great. Losing the tone means that Brooks' Hitchcock parody must rely on exaggerated signifiers (see: stylized angles and hyper-dramatic music) and throwbacks to famous scenes.