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 There is a "hellish hound" on the loose on the moors of England and "it feeds upon the trembling flesh of the heirs of Baskerville Hall." Now it faces its toughest foe "- the incomparble Sherlock Holmes." 1959, 86 minutes, Widescreen DVD
Sherlock Holmes takes on a parade of freaks including a guy with a webbed hand, a dog in a mask, and even a crazy Spanish chick, all in an effort to save the life of a rather snooty nobleman. Lest you get the idea that Sherlock actually cares whether Sir Henry Baskerville lives to patronize the local villagers, it's clear that when Sherlock thinks that Sir Henry has succumbed to the cursed canine, his source of distress is solely that he was unable to solve the mystery before Sir Henry checked out. The man has a reputation to think of, after all.
The first of an intended series of Sherlock Holmes films from British movie studio Hammer Films, it apparently went belly up at the box office, because the next Hammer Film was The Mummy and they never managed to get around to having Peter Cushing load up his pipe for another go round in the deer stalker cap. That was a shame since The Hound Of The Baskervilles is a good looking and well played effort, particularly with Cushing in the title role and Andre Morrell as the consummate yes-man, Watson. Christopher Lee as the Baskerville hounded (You knew it was coming - best to get it out of the way ASAP.) by the devil dog is fine, but his part doesn't require much from him, other than to act really scared when a big spider crawls on his shoulder.
The movie begins with a prologue that explains where this curse that's been dumped on the Baskervilles has come from. Of course, since there really isn't any curse, it doesn't matter where it came from, but it does provide some scenes of a gal getting stabbed and guy getting eaten by a dog. (Unfortunately the man-eating dog stuff is merely suggested, but you do get a full on dog attack later in the movie so we can mark this down as foreshadowing.) Long story short: In olden times, there was a Baskerville who tried to have his way with some woman that didn't see the charms of a loutish landowner who pimp slapped her dad around. When she wasn't agreeable to much more beyond screaming and running away from him, he stabbed her to death and then got attacked by a dog.
I'm not sure exactly how this qualifies as a curse so much as getting victimized by some careless pet owners because I'm used to curses being hauled out by gypsies, burning witches, and bored Greek gods. I don't even know where this dog came from or what its problem was. I guess it could have been the victim's mutt, but since she was escaping her attacker's manor and ran through the countryside until she got caught in some ruins, I doubt that she had time to stop by the house and let Tinkums out. Unless there was a doggie door. Good God, man! I'm a regular Sherlock Hemlock myself! Of course, the old doggie door gag! How many times has one of those "locked room mysteries" turned on the presence of a doggie door and a midget?
Having done my part in helping Holmes to unravel this mystery, let us fast forward to less olden times when Sherlock and Watson are visited in their London home by the alternately portly and sinister Dr. Mortimer. You'll notice in these mystery movies that tubby folks are either sinister or comic relief. To demonstrate what a master of the craft Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was, he has a lardly bishop who is a bug expert played for comic relief, but also has us suspecting that beneath his Twinkie-addled brain lurks an appetite for...murder! You know, because of that spider attack on Baskerville. Luckily, he's a man of God through and through and that spider just happens to be one that he lost earlier. How it got from Dartmoor to Christopher Lee's shoulder in London is another story.
Mortimer tells Holmes that the Baskervilles over at Dartmoor are in danger. Well, Sir Henry is in danger at least. His father or brother or eighth cousin twice removed, Charles Baskerville, has just turned up on the moors with a bad case of the deads! With Sir Henry coming home to collect his winnings, I mean his inheritance, Mortimer is worried that he'll be chewed on by that dang curse like he was some type of really tall and really British dog toy. Why does he care? I'm not sure we ever found out, but he did provide us with a prime suspect for much of the movie, so who's complaining?
Holmes agrees to take the case and then announces that he's much too busy to actually get started on it right away and sends Watson up to Dartmoor to nose around for him. This leads us to one of the weak parts of the movie. I paid my monies to see Sherlock Holmes in action, not his understudy! Peter Cushing disappears from the movie for about the next forty minutes and I began to wonder if I was watching a pilot episode for a spin-off series where Watson would go off and solve mysteries by himself. Eventually, at the movie's half way point, Holmes appears on the moors and informs Watson that he (Holmes) has been around the whole time, just hiding and investigating, gathering information and solving things all undercover like. Well shoot, I think I'll pull that the next time the boss wants to know where the hell I've been for the last two weeks: Right behind you all along, boss! Just keeping a low profile so that I can get more stuff all checked out and solved.
Holmes though hasn't gotten much of anything done, because there's a bevy of suspicious goings on plaguing the moors. You've got an escaped serial killer on the loose, mysterious activity in one of the rooms of Baskerville's manor, a missing painting, dogs howling, and a girl who runs away from Watson causing him to stumble into the mire on the moors. (Educational note: "mire" is British for "quicksand" and "Watson" is British for "clumsy old fart.") In spite of all this, Holmes is confident and manages to move the plot along at regular intervals by revealing generous hunks of information he managed to pick up from various people off-screen while we were watching Watson go for a swim in the mire.
Once he surfaces from deep cover, Holmes begins tying up loose ends, dispatching red herrings and gets caught in mine cave in. Holmes is even such a diabolical tactician that when he's crabby to Sir Henry about some dinner invitation to dine with Old Webbed Hand and his psychotic Spanish daughter, it was all calculated to make Sir Henry mad and go without Holmes and Watson so they could keep investigating! How British is that? Sherlock may be an arrogant, know-it-all bastard, but he would never stoop to being impolite, unless it was a crime solving tool!
Sir Henry attempts to put the moves on the Spanish gal and she in turns tries to put the curse on him! In a plot twist worthy of the finest episodes of One Life To Live, she reveals that her deformed father is in fact the illegitimate descendant of the Baskervilles. She has a bunch of issues revolving around how her dad took her mother back to England from Spain to become a gentleman farmer, but with the crappy land next to Baskerville manor (not much good for growing anything beyond mire and hellhounds I guess) he failed and her mom croaked and now she wants revenge! Or maybe she wanted the Baskervilles dead so that her illegitimate dad could inherit their estate. Though I don't know how they would prove that. Sure there was the painting they stole that showed that particular Baskerville and her father both had webbed hands, but under that thinking half of inbred England could show up and apply for the estate.
In any event, the hound that tormented the Baskervilles was just a cover used to advance the Webbed Hand family's secret agenda. Of course, that doesn't explain why they were trying to kill him with a tarantula in London. That wasn't too impressive, since nowadays people keep tarantulas as pets and they aren't really seen as threats unless they grow to monstrous size (see Tarantula for example) or suddenly decide to live together in giant mounds and terrorize William Shatner (see Kingdom Of The Spiders for example). The movie tries to justify its lame use of this particular spider by claiming that since the Baskervilles had weak hearts they would be disproportionately affected by a tarantula. How? By being scared to death? If they were that weak, why go to all the trouble of the dog cover story? And if they dog was just a cover to kill these guys, why bother with it when Sir Henry comes back when there is a serial killer on the loose you could blame his death on?
Sherlock's ability to unravel all these knotty plot questions shows his mettle as the world's greatest detective and other than the fact that he doesn't ever come close to displaying anything approaching a human emotion or human reaction or any kind of moment where he actually resembles a human at all, he's a great character. No, I take that back. After he survived the big mine cave in, he did complain that he was tired of waiting in the wagon while everyone thought he was still trapped in the cave in (he escaped through a different exit he had previously doped out) because his leg hurt, he was cold, and he needed an oil change, I mean he was hungry.
The DVD from MGM looks good and Hammer is able to lay on the sort of atmosphere you would hope a project like this would have. I could quibble about certain scenes that were supposed to be taking place on the moors or in the mine that were obviously filmed indoors (those nighttime moors sure can be brightly lit when you need a close up of Holmes and Watson and the mine cave in looked pretty stagey) and that Sherlock wasn't exactly fleshed out into a two dimensional character, but the movie's fast-paced series of red-herrings, false leads, and revelations more than made up for any of these shortcomings. It's too bad that we couldn't trade some of Hammer's later Dracula and Frankenstein films with Cushing and Lee for a couple more of these.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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