BroadcastChic
Excellent, a Must See
Huievest
Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.
Dirtylogy
It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.
Bluebell Alcock
Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies
johnstonjames
i love this dopey, crazy, dawg flick. it's so silly and irreverent it sends me into stitches of laughter every time. i agree with the reviewer who said it was ridiculous to be so hard on a movie that is this silly.even though it's very silly, it's not without some smarts. i mean come on, it had a screenplay written by Dudley Moore and the brilliant Peter Cook, who also give hilarious comic performances as Watson and Holmes. it was also directed by the controversial Andy Warhol chum Paul Morrissey who directed those nasty, perverted, but really off the wall Dracula and Frankenstein flicks. every time Morrissey's involved it's going to be one bumpy, giddy, ride.i guess for some light weights the humour here is a little hard to take. for one thing the humour can be sooo dry and oh sooo British. for another the humour can be pretty freaky and often super gross out. i love the weirdo conga line on the moors which feels like Bergman's 'Seventh Seal' on a psycho, acid trip gone amuck. and the scene where Holmes visits a icky Victorian massage parlor and gives them Watson's name instead of his own. and i loved it when Dudley Moore dressed in drag as Holmes's mother tells Holmes, "i remember when you were a little girl", to where Holmes replies, "mother, i was NEVER a little girl". the one legged Mr.Spiggott character was also a scream.Kenneth Williams is also hilarious portraying Henry Baskerville as a effeminate homosexual. i love it when Baskerville is insulted and he screams indignantly, "OH!HOW MEAN!".i thought the Chihauhau humour was a little too gross to watch at times, and for anyone who has seen this movie, of course those ain't Chihuahua's. don't know why they didn't use real Chihuahua's. guess Chihuahua's are scarce in England where it was filmed or something, dunt know.this is brilliant, dry, British, humour at it's best. and if you are a fan of Morrissey (i reluctantly am), or just a fan of Dudley and the brilliant Cook, than definitely check this psycho weird trip, out.
Michael_Elliott
Hound of the Baskervilles, The (1978) BOMB (out of 4)As a fan of bad movies I quite often find myself trying to track down and locate some of the worst films ever made. Sometimes these bad movies turn out to be entertaining but sometimes they turn out to be so bad that I often wonder why no one was seeing how bad the dailies were and didn't try to pull the plug. That's what I felt here. This story has been told countless times and since it's the most popular perhaps that's why everyone involved decided to shoot it. We have Peter Cook playing Holmes and Dudley Moore playing Watson but it really doesn't matter because I think anyone could have been in the roles and things would have been bad no matter what. Cook, Moore and director Morrissey wrote the screenplay her and I can't help but picture the three of them sitting around, passing a joint and laughing their heads off at what they were writing. That's the only thing I can think of that would make any of them feel as if they had anything working in this screenplay. The movie gets off to a horrendous start and it doesn't improve any and in the end I couldn't help but scratch my head and wonder why no one put a bullet in this sucker before it could hit theaters. The deadliest sin a comedy can make is that it's not funny and this movie makes the unforgivable sin of not having a single laugh. For the most part we have various characters acting gay and this appears to be the only joke going. Everyone acts extremely strange and that includes Holmes who we first see as some sort of sissy and I guess the screenwriters through this would be hilarious. The rest of the jokes are just downright flat and it almost seems like no effort was made to make any of them funny. For the life of me I couldn't understand how anyone could find this mess entertaining and most of the blame is right on the screenplay. As far as the performances go they're just as bad as the writing. The film ends with many bizarre jokes including an extremely bad spoof of THE EXORCIST that comes out of no where and seems out of place. I tried to think of at least one nice thing to say about this film but couldn't think of one as even the titles are boring and the music (by Moore) is pathetic. A complete disaster this one is and I'm sure you can safely call this the worst Holmes movie in history.
Chris Bright
Harry Thompson's very readable biography of Cook gives some of the background to the making of this dismal effort. Cook and Moore didn't have the creative control they should have done, and for whatever reason didn't feel able to pull the plug when it was clear that things were going horribly wrong.The main problem is that Paul Morrissey has no clue about how Pete & Dud's humour works. This leads him to try and shoehorn them into his idea of "Carry on Sherlock" (a genre which he also fatally misunderstands).Worse, much of Pete & Dud's groundbreaking work from the 60's is recycled in debased form - notably the one-legged man auditioning for the part of Tarzan.I didn't even make it all the way through this when it was on TV a while back. See "Bedazzled" which has the benefit of a proper director and is a worthy showcase for perhaps the best English comedian of all. This is only notable as evidence of/a contribution to Cook's sad decline.
didi-5
A misguided attempt to present a comic parody of the Conan Doyle tale, with Peter Cook as Sherlock Holmes and Dudley Moore as Dr Watson. Moore also plays Holmes' mother (!) and in this guise, is possibly the best thing in the film. Otherwise there is a spoof of the spinning head in The Exorcist, Denholm Elliot and a constantly urinating dog, and lame excuses for jokes' and funny situations' which really aren't. Although it has one or two moments which provoke a smile, the original source material isn't such that it survives being tweaked to this extent. Perhaps not the point, but the rest of the inspiration for this turkey must have been written on the back of a postage stamp. Skip this and watch Bedazzled and Not Only
But Also instead.