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Frenzy
original film poster
Directed by	Alfred Hitchcock
Produced by	William Hill Alfred Hitchcock (uncredited)
Written by	Novel: Arthur La Bern Screenplay: Anthony Shaffer
Starring	Jon Finch Alec McCowen Barry Foster
Music by	Ron Goodwin
Cinematography	Gilbert Taylor Leonard J. South (uncredited)
Editing by	John Jympson
Distributed by	Universal Pictures
Release date(s)	May 25, 1972 (UK) June 21, 1972 (US)
Running time	116 minutes
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Budget	US$3,500,000

Frenzy is a 1972 thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and is the penultimate feature film of his extensive career. The film is based upon the novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square by Arthur La Bern, and was adapted for the screen by Anthony Shaffer. La Bern later expressed his dissatisfaction with Shaffer's adaptation.^[1] The film stars Jon Finch, Alec McCowen and Barry Foster and features Billie Whitelaw, Anna Massey, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Bernard Cribbins and Vivien Merchant. The original music score was composed by Ron Goodwin.

Frenzy was Hitchcock's first film to earn an R-rating in the United States, as Psycho was originally released unrated. The film was screened at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, but wasn't entered into the main competition.^[2]

Plot

The film has become well known for a couple of grisly key scenes. The rape and murder of the Brenda character, played by Barbara Leigh-Hunt, makes use of numerous short edits in a similar fashion to the Janet Leigh shower scene in Psycho, and this serves to heighten the images of violence and horror.

Only one murder is depicted onscreen, as screenwriter Shaffer convinced Hitchcock that to show a second murder would be redundant. The murder of the barmaid Barbara Jane "Babs" Milligan occurs off-screen, although the audience sees her entering the killer's apartment and is left with a clear message that she will be murdered. The audience next sees the killer carrying a large sack and placing it onto the back of a lorry where it sits unobtrusively among a load of unsold potatoes ready to be transported back to Lincolnshire. He soon recalls that as he was strangling her, Babs had torn a pin from his lapel. He climbs on to the lorry to retrieve the pin from Babs' dead fingers, only to find the lorry starting off on its journey north. The killer desperately scrabbles through the sack of potatoes to find the dead woman's hand. As rigor mortis has set in, he is unable to prise the pin from her grasp until he has broken her fingers. This sequence is also composed of numerous edits to create tension and remains one of this film's most identifiable scenes.

As in several other previous Hitchcock films, the audience is fully aware of the identity of the killer (Bob Rusk, played by Barry Foster) very early in the proceedings, and is also shown how circumstantial guilt is rapidly built up around an innocent man (Richard Blaney, played by Jon Finch). Blaney is duly apprehended by the police and jailed, all the while maintaining his innocence. The investigating detective reconsiders the previous events and begins to believe that he has arrested the wrong man. In several scenes showing the detective's domestic situation, comedy is used to heighten the grisly nature of the death scenes.

The detective and his wife discuss the case and the wife gently points the detective in the right direction with a series of simple but appropriate questions and comments. The innocent man escapes from prison, and the detective knows that he will head to Rusk's flat at Covent Garden, so immediately goes there. Blaney has already arrived to find that the door to Rusk's flat is unlocked. He silently creeps in and sees what he presumes to be the top of Rusk's head, asleep in bed; he strikes the body with a metal bar. Just then the audience is shown the truth: it is not Rusk in bed, but another woman whose hand slips out from under the covers. Blaney pulls the covers back and there both for him and the audience it is confirmed: the face of another victim.

Suddenly the detective bursts through the door while Blaney is still standing over the corpse in shock holding the metal bar. Blaney protests his innocence to the detective but the expression on the policeman's face is clearly one of doubt; just then they both hear Rusk carrying something large and heavy up the staircase. The detective then realises Blaney is innocent and the two men wait in the flat for the killer, the detective hiding behind the door, while Blaney simply stands by the bed. When Rusk arrives, he has a large trunk with him, to carry away the dead body, and with the body lying in the bed, his guilt is finally obvious. The film ends with Chief Inspector Oxford's line, "Mr. Rusk, you're not wearing your tie". The abrupt ending of the film leaves the audience to understand that Blaney will be released, Rusk will be arrested and eventually sent to prison for life.

Cast

• Jon Finch as Richard Ian 'Dick' Blaney
• Alec McCowen as Chief Inspector Oxford
• Barry Foster as Robert 'Bob' Rusk
• Billie Whitelaw as Hetty Porter
• Anna Massey as Barbara Jane 'Babs' Milligan
• Barbara Leigh-Hunt as Brenda Margaret Blaney
• Bernard Cribbins as Felix Forsythe
• Vivien Merchant as Mrs. Oxford
• Clive Swift as Johnny Porter
• Michael Bates as Sergeant Spearman
• Jean Marsh as Monica Barling

Alfred Hitchcock's cameo appearance can be seen (three minutes into the film) in the center of a crowd scene wearing a bowler hat. Teaser trailers show a Hitchcock-like dummy floating in the River Thames and Hitchcock introducing the audience to Covent Garden via the fourth wall.

Michael Caine was Hitchcock's first choice for the role of Rusk, the main antagonist, but Caine thought the character was disgusting and said "I don't want to be associated with the part". Foster was cast after Hitchcock saw him in Twisted Nerve (which also featured Frenzy co-star Billie Whitelaw). Vanessa Redgrave reportedly turned down the role of Brenda, and Deep Red's David Hemmings (who had co-starred with Redgrave in Blow-Up) was considered to play Blaney.

Production

After a pair of unsuccessful films depicting political intrigue and espionage, Hitchcock returned to the murder genre with this film, which tells the story of a serial killer who rapes and strangles several women in London. The narrative makes use of the familiar Hitchcock theme of an innocent man overwhelmed by circumstantial evidence and wrongly assumed to be guilty. Many critics consider Frenzy the last great Hitchcock film and a return to form after his two previous works, Topaz and Torn Curtain.

Hitchcock set and filmed Frenzy in London after many years making films in the United States. The film opens with a sweeping shot along the Thames to Tower Bridge, and while the interior scenes were filmed at Pinewood Studios, much of the location filming was done in and around Covent Garden and was a homage to the London of Hitchcock's childhood. The son of a Covent Garden merchant, Hitchcock filmed several key scenes showing the area as the working produce market that it was. Aware that the area's days as a market were numbered, Hitchcock wanted to record the area as he remembered it. According to the making-of feature on the DVD, an elderly man who remembered Hitchcock's father as a dealer in the vegetable market came to visit the set during the filming and was treated to lunch by the director. The area as seen in the film still exists, but the market no longer operates from there. The buildings seen in the film are now occupied by banks and legal offices, restaurants and nightclubs, such as Henrietta Street, where Rusk lived (and Babs met her untimely demise). Oxford Street, which had the back alley (Dryden Chambers, now demolished) leading to Brenda Blaney's matrimonial agency, is the busiest shopping area in Britain. Nell of Old Drury which is the public house where the doctor and solicitor had their frank, plot-assisting discussion on sex killers, is still a thriving bar. The laneways where merchants and workers once carried their produce in the film are now occupied by tourists and street performers. To many people of a younger age, the world depicted on Frenzy shows a London that has all but disappeared.

References

External links

• Frenzy at the Internet Movie Database
• Frenzy at Rotten Tomatoes
• Frenzy at Allmovie
• Frenzy at Dial H for Hitchcock

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From StrategyWiki, the free strategy guide and walkthrough wiki

Frenzy
Developer(s)	Stern Electronics
Publisher(s)	Stern Electronics
Release date(s)	1982
Genre(s)	Action
System(s)	Arcade, ColecoVision
Players	1-2
Preceded by	Berzerk

Wikipedia has an article about:

Frenzy (video game)

After generating financial success for Stern Electronics with Berzerk, Alan McNeil set about creating a sequel to the game, and it was entitled Frenzy. Frenzy keeps the basic theme of Berzerk, pitting a lone human player against a never ending army of robots through a never ending maze of chambers.

It expands on the basic premise by providing not one, but two different styles of robots, destroyable walls, shot reflecting walls, and a no longer invincible Otto named crazy Otto. Every fourth chamber contains a special feature that will sometimes alter the situation in the room if shot at.

Frenzy never achieved the same level of success and notoriety of its predecessor, possibly due to its increased difficulty. Coleco purchased the rights to bring Frenzy home to its home system, ColecoVision, but it never made an official appearance on any other console.

Title screen.

ColecoVision box

Differences from Berzerk

• In Berzerk, the walls are all solid. In Frenzy, some of the walls of the maze are composed of dots which can be shot. This opens up strategies such as blasting a hole in the side of a room to escape when in trouble. The solid walls, on the other hand, now reflect shots. You can trick robots into killing themselves by standing on the opposite side of a reflective wall and letting them shoot themselves. The only wall that simply absorbs shots harmlessly as in the original is the closed door that appears behind you when you enter a new room.
• Neither type of wall is electrified, you can touch them without dying. On the other hand, you also can't kill robots by tricking them into walking into the now-harmless walls. In addition, it is harder to die by touching the robots, but still possible. Their shots and the blast radius from an exploding robot can kill you. There are two types of robots: skeletons and tanks. The two types have identical AI, but the skeletons are more difficult to shoot from above or below because they're so thin.
• In Berzerk, Evil Otto was invincible. In Frenzy, where he's known as Crazy Otto, shooting him once changes him from a smiley face to a 'neutral' face, and another shot converts him to a 'frowny' face. Another shot kills him. However, killing Crazy Otto makes him a little bit faster the next time he appears, which is usually immediately.
• Every four mazes, a special chamber feature appears. Each one has a specific effect on game-play for that one room. The Power Plant and the Central Computer are surrounded by walls made entirely of 'dots', while Big Otto and the Robot Factory are surrounded by reflective walls with only one breakable 'dot' in the corner, making them more difficult to hit. In order, they are:
  • Big Otto: If you kill Crazy Otto, not only does he immediately respawn as usual, but Big Otto sends four more Ottos at you, all moving at top speed.
  • Power Plant: Shooting the power plant once will disable it, and all robots in the room will stop moving.
  • Central Computer: Shooting the computer will cause all the robots to start moving and firing erratically. While they're in such a state, the walls can kill them.
  • Robot Factory: The factory will continue to spit out additional robots while you're in the stage, taunting you as it does so. Shooting the factory has no effect.
• Like the Robot Factory, shooting Big Otto has no effect. Big Otto starts out with closed eyes and a neutral expression, but his expression changes to one of rage, with glowing red eyes and a frowning mouth, when you kill Crazy Otto. He also smiles when you die, though his eyes remain the same as before, either closed or open.
• Finally, the robots are nowhere near as talkative. They only speak in a few specific situations. They say 'Robot attack!' when Crazy Otto appears, 'Charge attack to kill destroy!' when you kill Crazy Otto and he respawns, 'The Humanoid must not destroy the robot!' when entering the Big Otto room, 'The Humanoid...' when shooting the Central Computer, and randomly alternates between 'A robot must get the humanoid' and 'A robot, not a chicken' when the Robot Factory dispenses a new robot. The constant background chatter of the original game is gone.

From Wikia Gaming, your source for walkthroughs, games, guides, and more!

Frenzy
Developer(s)	Stern Electronics
Publisher(s)	Stern Electronics Arcade Coleco ColecoVision
Designer(s)	Alan McNeil
Release date	Arcade: 1982 (NA) ColecoVision: 1983 (NA)
Genre	Run and Gun
Mode(s)	Single player 1-2 players alternating
Age rating(s)	N/A ColecoVision
Platform(s)	Arcade ColecoVision
Input	ColecoVision Controller
Credits | Soundtrack | Codes | Walkthrough

Frenzy is an arcade game released in 1982. It is the sequel to the game Berzerk. It was ported to the ColecoVision.

Gameplay

Again you're trapped in a maze where there are killer robots programmed to hunt you down and shoot you, and Evil Otto again appears to torture you. In this version, though, you can kill Evil Otto, though he will reappear again faster than before. You can also shoot holes through certain walls, but be careful when you fire shots at walls that can ricochet your shots, because you can accidentally kill yourself. Some rooms feature a giant Evil Otto that can unleash a swarm of little Evil Ottos at you; some have a power generator that you can shoot to immobilize the robots; some have a computer that will cause the robots to go crazy and kill themselves if you shoot it; and some have a machine that can manufacture more robots until you shoot it.

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