Sherlock Holmes - Der Vampir von Whitechapel

The first question you need to ask is "Why the hell bother?". Sherlock Holmes has been done to death and with Jeremy Brett, reached the apex of plausibility. The Basil Rathbones are good fun and there's been numerous feature film attempts, some of which are excellent and some of which should be forever stricken from the records. Unfortunately these Hallmark efforts fit into the latter category.

I've always enjoyed Matt Frewer's acting and he certainly has the perfect face for Holmes but the quality of acting is abysmal. It's like a 1960's Disney animated version of Holmes, cod Cock-er-knee accents and Sherlock has become some sort of pantomime version of himself, complete with stupid fake upper class accent and ability to annoy practically everyone. This results in all dramatic suspense being lost as we're expected to accept this Holmes as a comic geek.

The few Hallmark episodes that have been produced are all stinkers and have been made purely for the US market that still believes that Victorian England was a perfect chocolate box representation.

I have a sneaky suspicion that director Rodney Gibbons is the main culprit and the cause of the rampant artificiality of these terrible additions to the cult of Holmes.

If you like amateur dramatics then you'll love these. If you love the density of Holmes' Victorian world you'd be better off with the many Jeremy Brett episodes.

This starts off with a rather curious disclaimer stating it has taken the characters from the public domain and that no effort has been made to liaise with the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. All perfectly legal, of course, but it did make me wonder what liberties they were about to take with the long established characters of "Sherlock Holmes" (Matt Frewer) and "Dr. Watson" (Kenneth Welsh). Well, as it happens, that intrigue is about as good as this gets as our super-sleuthing duo become embroiled in a series of murders that people suspect might be the work of a vampire. Frewer and Welsh are not Rathbone/Bruce, but they make for a decent pairing in this otherwise unremarkable drama that seems to draw more from "Cadfael" then from "Hound of the Baskervilles". The mystery develops pretty routinely, as you'd expect from a ninety minute television movie, before an ending that reminded me of "Scooby Doo". It isn't terrible, indeed the production looks fine, but the sum of the parts is underwhelming, with some pretty wordy dialogue and too many characters to clutter up any participation from the audience in the investigation. Maybe one for die-hard fans of these iconic characters, but otherwise just daytime telly fodder.

Matt Frewer's four films for Hallmark television are never likely to budge memories of the series made for Granada in the 1980s and 1990s; however, they are meant to appeal to a young audience and in this respect, they probably succeed.

Frewer is saddled with a comedy deerstalker, the worst British accent since Robert Duvall played Watson in 'The Seven-Per-Cent Solution', and an annoying range of tics, smirks and general non-Holmes type behaviour. But he does have a rather good Watson in Kenneth Welsh who is a more serious version of Nigel Bruce from the 1940s Holmes films, so there are some compensations.

The story here is nothing to do with Conan Doyle's 'The Sussex Vampyre'; it concerns a group of monks who are slowly being killed by what appears to be a vampire bat - each are found slumped and cold and bleeding from two wounds to the neck. Is there something supernatural going on, or, as Holmes believes, it this an inside job? The filming is actually not that bad - Canada passes for Victorian England, and set dressing isn't that inaccurate. With a better actor in the lead, these could be worthy additions to the screen Holmes. It's just that Frewer's version doesn't work - unless you see him as a kind of cartoon, comedy, superhero Holmes.

If you are a Holmes completist, then of course you will want to watch these. But otherwise, you won't miss anything by staying away.

It's really nice to have new Sherlock Holmes adaptions played by different actors. Every actor who played Sherlock Holmes and dr. Watson bring their own Aura to the parts. Give it a chance just enjoy it for what it. Makes more sense than the Robert Downey jr. Versions. Good atmosphere, fun to watch. I wish there were more than four.

From the opening few seconds it is immediately obvious that this is a TV movie. The production values scream this out. The music and sets all show their limitations pretty clearly, while the acting on display is very much of television standard. So from the get-go you are at least under no false impressions of the scope of this one and that's probably a good thing in the long run because this Sherlock Holmes mystery doesn't really ever ascend above the level of mediocre.

The story is about a series of murders at a monastery seemingly committed by a vampire in the same area as Jack the Ripper operated. One of the monastic Brothers believes that it is the work of a demon he claims to have encountered before in British Guyana called Desmondo. The 'agnostic' Holmes is sceptical from the outset regarding this explanation and sets about applying his famed logic to solving the murder-mystery.

Apparently this is not actually based on an Arthur Conan Doyle original story. This may go some way to explaining some of the more ambiguous supernatural material such as a possibly-maybe divine intervention moment towards the end. Despite a very promising set-up, it isn't a particularly exciting or well written story. The actor who played Holmes didn't seem right to me, on the other hand Dr Watson was portrayed in a textbook manner. But overall, the acting was sub-par amongst the side characters, with the character who played the police inspector spouting a truly dreadful 'Scottish' accent. Despite all this, it was an acceptable enough way of spending ninety minutes and I was interested enough to discover the solution to the mystery. But overall there was little in the way of actual atmosphere or inspiration in this one.