Young Frankenstein begins on a dark and stormy night, with the camera panning lovingly over a torchlit courtyard, zooming slowly in to a dusty window, and dissolving as the clock strikes midnight into a caressing inspection of the Gothic inscription on a coffin reposing within a dank and doomladen crypt. A brilliant pastiche of the horror film's studied quest for atmospherics, the sequence suggests not only that Mel Brooks has added some sort of cinematic style to his bag of tricks, but that he knows his genre and intends to stick to it. An illusion that is dashed all too soon … as one discovers that anything goes even more frantically than it did in Blazing Saddles…. [All] too often Brooks resorts to the most clichéd sort of Carry On smut ("What knockers!" says Frederick, looking at Inga's décolletagé but referring to the brasswork on Castle Frankenstein's portals), he repeats himself endlessly (the witless joke about Frau Blücher's name is done five times), he does the film a serious injury by allowing Marty Feldman to indulge some grotesquely unfunny mugging, and he even sinks to the perpetration of an Abbott and Costello routine. He also commits the unpardonable error of trying to milk laughs from something—Lionel Atwill's wooden arm in Son of Frankenstein—which was treated with much surer wit in the original. The real pity of all this is that two sequences not only come very close to brilliance, but also show the path a really good parody might have followed. One is the Monster's game of throwing flowers into the water with the little girl, staged with the same tender, fragile charm as in Whale's original but in which, as the little girl wails "Oh dear, nothing left, what shall we throw in now?", the monster turns to stare knowingly but doubtfully at the camera: he, too, has seen the movie. The other is the Monster's encounter with the blind hermit who, in trying to be hospitable to his new friend, accidentally pours soup over him, showers him with wine and splinters of glass in drinking his health, and finally drives him out gibbering with terror and rage after setting fire to him in error for a cigar. In both these sequences, Brooks extends the spirit of the originals, confounds expectations, and creates a sort of poetry of his own very much in keeping with, in particular, The Bride of Frankenstein. But after The Producers and Blazing Saddles, no doubt one has to accept that a Mel Brooks film is a ragbag containing both best and worst. (pp. 90-1)