A stranger with piercing eyes moves into a small village and bad things begin to happen. A child dies. A dog is paralyzed. Young women show up with two small bloody marks on their necks. Holmes and Watson are call in, and it all gets very confusing.
It hasn't got anything to do with Conan-Doyle's "The Sussex Vampire." It looks instead like an attempt to make a traditional horror film with settings like foggy graveyard, bare ruined estates, a mysterious tree, a crippled boy, a stake through the heart of a staring corpse. Holmes seems to suffer an hallucination while the stranger with the exopthalmia cackles like a maniac a few feet away.
The stranger has learned the power to cloud men's minds, and women's too, from time he spent investigating mysteries of the Peruvian Indians. Something like that. There seems to be an infinite number of subplots involving mothers and maids.
It's a hash. You can find some quietly amusing nuggets in it. Holmes is at his desk, fiddling around with chemical junk, test tubes, and a bunsen burner and has asked Watson to read him any interesting items in the morning paper. "There is a new trend in women's headgear," reads Watson, and something goes poof and a small cloud rises at Holmes' desk, followed by an instant cut. The location shooting was as good as the best of any of the episodes and the acting isn't bad, except for Jeremy Brett's somewhat swollen features, a result of both age and the congestive heart failure from which he was suffering.
I just don't know why it was made.
It hasn't got anything to do with Conan-Doyle's "The Sussex Vampire." It looks instead like an attempt to make a traditional horror film with settings like foggy graveyard, bare ruined estates, a mysterious tree, a crippled boy, a stake through the heart of a staring corpse. Holmes seems to suffer an hallucination while the stranger with the exopthalmia cackles like a maniac a few feet away.
The stranger has learned the power to cloud men's minds, and women's too, from time he spent investigating mysteries of the Peruvian Indians. Something like that. There seems to be an infinite number of subplots involving mothers and maids.
It's a hash. You can find some quietly amusing nuggets in it. Holmes is at his desk, fiddling around with chemical junk, test tubes, and a bunsen burner and has asked Watson to read him any interesting items in the morning paper. "There is a new trend in women's headgear," reads Watson, and something goes poof and a small cloud rises at Holmes' desk, followed by an instant cut. The location shooting was as good as the best of any of the episodes and the acting isn't bad, except for Jeremy Brett's somewhat swollen features, a result of both age and the congestive heart failure from which he was suffering.
I just don't know why it was made.