I still can't totally understand why so many fans seem to like the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes. Don't get me wrong, Basil Rathbone is a good Sherlock Holmes. Nigel Bruce on the other hand is so absolutely awful that his portrayal of Dr. Watson far eclipses Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes! To be fair, I think that part of the problem is that the Nigel Bruce Watson was written poorly to begin with. The Watson of these series of movies is nothing more than an incompetent man of frightful stupidity and vivid imagination. He has been turned from a faithful narrator who has a narrow view on events to a gag character who only provides laughter or miss-steps at the right (cheesily, not actually right) moment.
This movie is probably something that would (or SHOULD, at least) have true fans of Sherlock Holmes cringing. Although the "original" title should give anyone a clue that this isn't an actual Doyle story, so this comes as no surprise. The writers seem to be singularly uninspired and unintelligent. Their story is like a hodge podge of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories with aspects here and there from this story or that (most notably the phosphorus!). Not only do they rip off previous stories and mash them together, but they also fail at it.
The story is just awful. I had to force myself to endure this movie in the hopes that the ending might provide a nice twist or something else. Too bad I was wrong. The movie was dreadfully boring and didn't truly inspire anything other than intense dislike (particularly for the bumbling fool they'd made of Watson - stuck in a bog! Twice! That's just not funny).
If you like bad jokes like that or if you don't particularly care for intellectual stimulation in your mystery movies I can't even understand why you bother watching the stuff! But if you do, then go ahead and watch this awful stuff. If you want a faithful representation of the Sherlock Holmes series, you're not getting it here. And you are definitely not getting it as long as Nigel Bruce plays Watson. This is just taking old favorites and ruining them. But that seems to be a dubious pleasure to some of you.
This movie is probably something that would (or SHOULD, at least) have true fans of Sherlock Holmes cringing. Although the "original" title should give anyone a clue that this isn't an actual Doyle story, so this comes as no surprise. The writers seem to be singularly uninspired and unintelligent. Their story is like a hodge podge of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories with aspects here and there from this story or that (most notably the phosphorus!). Not only do they rip off previous stories and mash them together, but they also fail at it.
The story is just awful. I had to force myself to endure this movie in the hopes that the ending might provide a nice twist or something else. Too bad I was wrong. The movie was dreadfully boring and didn't truly inspire anything other than intense dislike (particularly for the bumbling fool they'd made of Watson - stuck in a bog! Twice! That's just not funny).
If you like bad jokes like that or if you don't particularly care for intellectual stimulation in your mystery movies I can't even understand why you bother watching the stuff! But if you do, then go ahead and watch this awful stuff. If you want a faithful representation of the Sherlock Holmes series, you're not getting it here. And you are definitely not getting it as long as Nigel Bruce plays Watson. This is just taking old favorites and ruining them. But that seems to be a dubious pleasure to some of you.