YMMV / High Anxiety

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The parody of The Birds. Even for a Mel Brooks film, it's weird.
  • Brooks has said in interviews that it was Hitchcock himself who came up with the scene, when the two met to discuss the film.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Brophy blowing up his photo negative to absurd size is even funnier now that technology advances have made it totally unnecessary.
• Narm Charm: The bellboy's scream is so over-the-top and manic. And that's what makes it so memorable.
• Nightmare Fuel: The doctor being killed by being trapped in his car while the radio plays so loud it bursts his eardrums is genuinely disturbing.
• One-Scene Wonder: Future big time director Barry Levinson is cast as a high-strung bellboy who gets progressively more irritated with Brooks' requests for a newspaper until he goes in Norman Bates-mode. It is considered among the most memorable scenes of the film.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • You probably shouldn't try Bavarian Fire Drill-ing your way through airport security like that nowadays.
    Thorndyke ("disguised" as an old Jewish man): I beeped! I beeped! Take me away! Take me back to Russia! Put me in irons! I beeped! The mad beeper is loose! Take away the beeper! Take me away!
  • In the age where even the most common cell phone has some form of high-definition photography, the bellhop printing ever-enlarging exposures to prove Thorndyke's innocence seems like overkill.
• Values Dissonance: When Thorndyke arrives at the airport at the beginning, a man who's supposedly a police officer approaches him and asks Thorndyke to follow him. Turns out it's a gay man trying to proposition Thorndyke, which plays into the worst Flaming Devil stereotypes.

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