Metacritic reviews

Mel Brooks is home with Young Frankenstein, his most disciplined and visually inventive film (it also happens to be very funny).

Brooks's most accomplished work, combining his well-known brand of comedy with stylish direction and a uniformly excellent cast.

Young Frankenstein (1974) and High Anxiety are as much loving homage as irreverent spoof.

As played by Gene Wilder in Mel Brooks's funniest, most cohesive comedy to date, this Dr. Frankenstein is a marvelous addled mixture of young Tom Edison, Winnie-the-Pooh, and your average Playboy reader with a keen appreciation of beautiful bosoms.

A perfect example of early Brooks firing on all spoofily comedic cylinders.

Longer on charm and cheer than on humor of knee-pounding hilarity...the funniest film of the season by default.

It isn’t a dialogue comedy; it’s visceral and lower. It’s what used to be called a crazy comedy, and there hasn’t been this kind of craziness on the screen in years. It’s a film to go to when your rhythm is slowed down and you’re too tired to think. You can’t bring anything to it (Brooks’ timing is too obvious for that) ; you have to let it do everything for you, because that’s the only way it works.

More about the myth of Karloff than the monster, this Mel Brooks pastiche is probably his best early film: within limits, it has unity, pace, and even a dramatic interest of sorts.

It is good-natured, lowbrow, backlot, hit-or-miss humor, but with no cumulative effect beyond its succession of hard-worked jokes. More theatrical than cinematic in its conception, this group effort relies on the improvisation of its performers.

By and large, a rather pitiful parody of the Universal Frankenstein movies, taking typically Brooksian liberties with characters and plot, resorting to juvenile mugging, and relying to a great extent on fairly authentic sets and photography for its better moments.