Frenzy (1972)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

To me, this movie is perfection.

Best movie ever!

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

A man finds himself on the run from police when his ex-wife is found dead and his ex-wife's employee spots her husband leaving the crime scene. Her husband isn't responsible for the crime and must fight to prove his innocence.For the most part, Frenzy is quite a darkly plotted crime film and is notably more risqué than many of his previous films; we witness a rape and an actresses bare breasts exposed which were not the sort of things that you'd normally see in a Hitchcock film. These things undoubtedly make Frenzy a memorable film, but possibly not entirely for the right reasons....Frenzy is quite slow-paced, but I feel that it may be deliberately slow (it kind of establishes Blaney as something of a lovable rogue which perhaps helps to get the audience on his side). The film does suffer from being a bit soapy at times (many of the scenes involving Blaney, Babs and Forsythe felt a little unnecessary and for me kind of got in the way of moving things along).Another thing that I found slightly disappointing about this film is that it isn't played out as a mystery film and is one that is more about a wrongly accused man fighting to prove his innocence. The way that the story is played out was effective enough to hold my interest (in the sense that I wanted to see how Blaney would finally expose Rusk). But personally, I would have preferred it if the killer's identity had been kept a secret and the audience then had to figure out who the killer was (this to me would have made it far more exciting). However, Hitchcock and screenwriter Anthony Schaffer were working from a novel so I can't really criticise either of them for the story that was presented to me.Frenzy is also probably one of the most tonally inconsistent films that I've seen from Hitchcock; the basic plot is quite dark and yes it contains that one brutal scene, but then he also seems to try some comedic touches to the film; the scene with the Inspector and his wife and her rather odd choices of cuisine or the scene where Rusk is in the potato truck with the corpse. It's possible that Hitchcock was trying to counter-balance a lot of the grim plot mechanics with some light-hearted relief. Although this seems a bit odd when watching the film, the two conflicting tones do serve each other fairly well.Hitchcock's camera work is flawless as always and observant viewers will spot Hitchcock's cameo role in this film (he's actually featured in more than one scene in this film). Frenzy has enough strengths to make it worth watching, but this is not classic Hitchcock in my book.

What a disappointment Frenzy turned out to be. I always wondered why nobody talks about this Hitchcock film, and now I know why. It is entirely devoid of the style and nuance and subtle humor of the master's classics. Crime and violence are needless to say the focus of this director's oeuvre, but usually he manages to approach those themes in very artistic and creative ways. Not here.Frenzy basically offers the viewer insight into actual rapes and murders. Very unpleasant to watch and not mitigated by any aesthetic agenda--at least as far as I could see. But I won't be watching it again to find out whether I was just somehow obtuse. This was a unidimensional work which might titillate viewers who share the culprit's tastes, but for anyone else? Just plain gross. Way too graphic, and gratuitously so. Unlike Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (equally disturbing), this film does not redeem itself in either message or form. There really is no message or investigation going on here. Perverted sadistic murderers have untamed desires and are to be avoided at all costs? Please. Tell us something that we don't already know.

A man who rapes women and then strangles them with a necktie is terrorizing London. Chief Inspector Oxford is in charge of the case, assisted by Sergeant Spearman. At one point during the movie, Oxford tells Spearman that when they catch up with the necktie strangler, it will probably turn out that he is impotent. Spearman expresses surprise, and rightly so, for this is a bizarre claim. A man who is impotent cannot get an erection, and therefore is incapable of having sexual intercourse. Therefore, if the necktie strangler were impotent, there would be no semen in the vaginas of his victims. Since all of his victims were murdered and thus could not give evidence, why would the police think the women were raped? Inspector Oxford does not address that question, but simply tells Sergeant Spearman that it is not sex that gratifies such rapists, but violence.Several years prior to the production of this movie, it became fashionable to say that rape was not about sex, and some people maintain that theory to this day. It is said that rape is really about power, about dominating women. Even if it is so that rape has some motive other than sex, there still has to be a rape, and that means that the rapist cannot be impotent, regardless of what his motive might be. If we bend over backwards to make sense of Oxford's claim, we might say that the rapist is able to penetrate, but cannot achieve completion, cannot ejaculate. But that would mean no semen in the vagina, which brings us right back to the question, what would make the police think the women had been raped?Oxford speaks with an authoritative voice in the movie, and so we know we are supposed to believe him. But aside from squaring impotence with rape, there is the incongruity between his words and the rape that took place in the movie thirty minutes before, when we see Rusk raping Brenda. In the history of mainstream cinema, no movie, made before or since, has depicted sex, consensual or coerced, in which anyone, male or female, experiences greater heights of sexual ecstasy than does that of the necktie strangler in "Frenzy."What is remarkable about this movie is that, in discussing it with others, I have noticed that a lot of people accept the pronouncements of the detective, notwithstanding their apparent inconsistency with the rape scene. This is in part due to the authoritative voice of the detective, and in part due to the widespread acceptance of the rape-is-not-about-sex theory at that time. I have seen people twist themselves into a pretzel trying to argue that the rapist never really got it up, let alone gratified himself sexually.I suspect that this was Hitchcock's idea of a joke. He purposely put this contradiction into the movie between the words of the pompous detective and the scene of sexual passion, as his way of making fun of that theory.

When we think of Alfred Hitchcock then our minds tend to shift only towards his most popular films like Psycho, Vertigo and Rear Window. This is for good reason since they are most certainly incredible films and helped revolutionise cinema. But at the same time with a film career spanning around 53 films he has many incredible classics that seem to be forgotten overtime. This is unfortunate seeing as it leads to great films such as Frenzy being less talked about then his other films.Just like all the great Hitchcock films, Frenzy is a suspenseful thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat through the entire film by creating interesting characters and placing them in dangerous situations. It's pretty similar to the other Hitchcock plots like North by Northwest in that there's one man on the run for a murder that he did not commit whilst the real killer remains at large.Though there are two differences to this formula. The first is that the film is far more brutal then his previous films creating much more detail and realism within the killings. So much that it was the first Hitchcock film to be given an 18 rating on release. Also unlike most of Hitchococks films which will maintain an element of mystery as to the killers identity for most of the film, this one shows who the killer is within the first act and maintains a lot of focus on the killer throughout the film. Whilst it is risky revealing this so early within the film it does have the benefit of allowing a far more in depth and interesting portrait in to the mind of the serial killer throughout the rest of the film. We get to witness his complete lack of sympathy or regret over what he is doing and how unnoticed he is by the rest of society. The reveal even leads to some incredible scenes that I'd place amongst Hitchcock's best. One of which is when we first witness the killer strangling his victim. Hitchcock uses a similar style to the famous shower scene in Psycho where he uses quick editing and varying close ups to add a feeling of horror and struggle that the victim is going through. There are two key differences however to the style being used in Psycho, with the first being seeing the killers excitement as he throttles the victim so we see it more from the victims perspective rather than the killers. The second being that this does not have a score and instead we hear only the muffled screams of the women as she is throttled, creating a more threatening feeling of eerie realism. Whilst not quite as iconic as the shower scene in Psycho it is still extremely intense and suspenseful and amongst Hitchcock's best scenes. Along with the killer the film also builds up the leading man who is falsely convicted of the murders called Blaney. Unlike the usual Hitchcock leading man Blaney is not an impressive person. If anything he is extremely reliant on other people throughout the film and is actually quite aggressive, to the point where you can understand why the police would be hunting him as a suspect. This not only makes the story more believable but also since we know that he won't catch the killer it keeps us curious as to how the real killer will get caught.I doubt that this will be anyone's favourite Hitchcock. But that's just because his classics just can't be beat and this remains an incredible film. It does everything that we come to expect from Hitchcock films, from maintaining his nail biting suspense to innovating his own formula by increasing the role of the killer within the film. There is never any doubt that this is a Hitchcock film and any fan of the director will be certain to enjoy the film.