The best Mel Brooks film with the finest Gene Wilder performance is this near-flawless horror spoof that’s shot in velvety monochrome and pays loving homage to the original Universal monster movies of the 1930s.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 5, 2024

In some ways it can now be considered not as satire or spoof, but a continuation of the Frankenstein genre, a connoisseur development or theme-variation not so far removed from the Hammer or Warhol riffs.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 3, 2024

This black-and-white parody of the Karloff classic is the most cinematically assured, coherent and (relatively speaking) tasteful of Brooks's films.

| Feb 10, 2022

What it demonstrates is that for spoof to work, the spoofers must have deep affection for the material out of which they are wringing the wee.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 27, 2019

The Brooks of 'Young Frankenstein' isn't really skewering the conventions of the horror movie - he's paying tribute to them, and using them as scaffolding for his particular brand of goofy, Borscht Belt burlesque.

| Jun 18, 2016

It is good-natured, lowbrow, backlot, hit-or-miss humor, but with no cumulative effect beyond its succession of hard-worked jokes.

| Oct 3, 2015

Wilder's hysteria seems perfectly natural. You never question what's driving him to it; his fits are lucid and total. They take him into a different dimension -- he delivers what Harpo promised.

| Jan 15, 2013

More about the myth of Karloff than the monster, this Mel Brooks pastiche is probably his best early film.

| Jun 4, 2007

For a really delightful parody, James Whale's own Bride of Frankenstein is far better value.

| Jun 24, 2006

It shows artistic growth and a more sure-handed control of the material by a director who once seemed willing to do literally anything for a laugh. It's more confident and less breathless.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 23, 2004

Some of the gags don't work, but fewer than in any previous Brooks film that I've seen, and when the jokes are meant to be bad, they are riotously poor. What more can one ask of Mel Brooks?

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 20, 2003

So many of this film's comedy bits are now-classic...

| Jun 27, 2001

Young Frankenstein emerges as a reverently satirical salute to the 1930s horror film genre.

| Feb 13, 2001