High Anxiety

HIGH ANXIETY is Mel Brooks' spoof of over ten Alfred Hitchcock classics, including Psycho, Vertigo and The Birds. Dr. Richard H. Thorndyke, a renowned Harvard psychiatrist with a concealed fear of heights, or High Anxiety.  Thorndyke takes over as the newest director of the PsychoNeurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous after the last director dies under suspicious circumstances.  He soon finds himself to be in the company of some very strange colleagues, including the severely pneumatic Nurse Diesel and the snippy Dr. Montague.  Victoria Brisbane is the eccentric daughter of a patient at the institute and the hilarious doppelganger to Hitchcock's classic "mysterious icy blonde."  She and Thorndyke fall in love and he is pulled into a twisted plot concerning the institute, a psychiatric convention and a missing professor that threatens his own sanity.