There must be something terribly wrong with a spoof of a famous literary source (that has also managed to rope in a roster of star comedians) if its biggest laughs are provided by the straight actors' willingness to be embarrassed as they had never been before and, worse still, that these same gags are completely extraneous to the narrative and are even repeated twice in the film! Spoofing Sherlock Holmes was hardly a novel idea in the late 1970s George C. Scott, Gene Wilder and, to some extent, Nicol Williamson have already tried that (albeit with little success) so it's even harder to fathom now what possessed the film-makers here to have another go at that concept. Nevertheless, they did have the good sense to go for Holmes' most famous case and engage the services of that afore-mentioned impressive cast: Peter Cook (as Holmes), Dudley Moore (as, among others, Dr. Watson), Kenneth Williams (as Sir Henry Baskerville), Terry-Thomas (as Dr. Mortimer), Denholm Elliott (as Stapleton), Joan Greenwood (as Ms. Stapleton), Roy Kinnear (as the escaped convict Selden), Hugh Griffith (as a poacher), Spike Milligan (in an irrelevant cameo as a cop on the moors), etc.
The blame for this dreadful debacle should be laid squarely at the feet of Cook and Moore who, with Andy Warhol's in-house director Paul Morrissey, concocted the deadly script (described by Williams himself in his personal letters as "a hodgepodge of rubbish"). Morrissey might have seemed like a good choice for director after having given relatively the same irreverent treatment to both Frankenstein and Dracula under the aegis of his enigmatic boss back home but, as a big fan of the horror genre, even I hesitated for the longest time before catching those two and wasn't won over by them when I eventually did! But this is undoubtedly much worse: in the original story, Sherlock Holmes disappears for a long period of time but here they insist in keeping track of his whereabouts visits to a massage parlor (given him by three fat and hirsute women) and to his mediumistic mother (also played by Moore!), masquerading in a false beard at an auction, etc. Indeed, Moore (apart from being co-screenwriter and composer) has four distinct roles in the film that also include an irrelevant bit as a one-legged man applying for the position of a "runner" at Holmes' office and a piano player supposedly accompanying live a screening of the film and being pelted with vegetables by a disapproving audience at the end of it! Well, at least, they were prescient enough to anticipate the right reaction
As if that wasn't bad enough, Williams 'in character' is totally miscast for the role of Sir Henry and, even if he manages to waive through it with utmost dignity, Terry-Thomas is wasted when playing straight as he does here. Still, the pits are reached with the belated appearance of Elliott and Greenwood: Dr. Watson is repeatedly bathed in cat pee during his interrogation of the former and, later, unknowingly eats from a plate in which the same cat had just done its daily duties. Greenwood, then, was granted the dubious honor of being perhaps the first actress to spoof Linda Blair's demonic child in THE EXORCIST as she invites Moore to her levitating bed and tickles him with her long, wiggling tongue and, later, doing an array of 360-degree head-spins while sitting at table and, inevitably, showering her guests with the proverbial pea-soup vomit!! Frankly, these sequences were so outrageous and unexpected that I couldn't help but burst out in spasms of laughter but, the more I think of them now, the less amusing they seem to be.
Apparently, the film is available on a Special Edition DVD which presents the film in a widescreen print of the original 85-minute British theatrical release version and a full-frame edition of the shorter U.S. cut that was trimmed by 11 minutes and, reportedly, made even less sense than before. While I did managed to acquire just the former, my copy was ever so slightly off in terms of lip-synching on my cheap DVD player model so I elected to watch it on my PC monitor which, while solving this problem, severely window box the image!! Truly a case of a hounded (by the way, the 'monster' itself is here no bigger than any normal mutt as if anyone was truly expecting anything fearsome and, rather than attack Sir Henry, it actually befriends him at first sight!) movie through and through.
P.S. Recently, I was stunned to learn that a friend of mine had tried watching Billy Wilder's ill-fated but nonetheless revered THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (1970) and found it "revolting" (and he's usually a big fan of the director!); I really have to wonder, at this point, just what he'd make of this one!
The blame for this dreadful debacle should be laid squarely at the feet of Cook and Moore who, with Andy Warhol's in-house director Paul Morrissey, concocted the deadly script (described by Williams himself in his personal letters as "a hodgepodge of rubbish"). Morrissey might have seemed like a good choice for director after having given relatively the same irreverent treatment to both Frankenstein and Dracula under the aegis of his enigmatic boss back home but, as a big fan of the horror genre, even I hesitated for the longest time before catching those two and wasn't won over by them when I eventually did! But this is undoubtedly much worse: in the original story, Sherlock Holmes disappears for a long period of time but here they insist in keeping track of his whereabouts visits to a massage parlor (given him by three fat and hirsute women) and to his mediumistic mother (also played by Moore!), masquerading in a false beard at an auction, etc. Indeed, Moore (apart from being co-screenwriter and composer) has four distinct roles in the film that also include an irrelevant bit as a one-legged man applying for the position of a "runner" at Holmes' office and a piano player supposedly accompanying live a screening of the film and being pelted with vegetables by a disapproving audience at the end of it! Well, at least, they were prescient enough to anticipate the right reaction
As if that wasn't bad enough, Williams 'in character' is totally miscast for the role of Sir Henry and, even if he manages to waive through it with utmost dignity, Terry-Thomas is wasted when playing straight as he does here. Still, the pits are reached with the belated appearance of Elliott and Greenwood: Dr. Watson is repeatedly bathed in cat pee during his interrogation of the former and, later, unknowingly eats from a plate in which the same cat had just done its daily duties. Greenwood, then, was granted the dubious honor of being perhaps the first actress to spoof Linda Blair's demonic child in THE EXORCIST as she invites Moore to her levitating bed and tickles him with her long, wiggling tongue and, later, doing an array of 360-degree head-spins while sitting at table and, inevitably, showering her guests with the proverbial pea-soup vomit!! Frankly, these sequences were so outrageous and unexpected that I couldn't help but burst out in spasms of laughter but, the more I think of them now, the less amusing they seem to be.
Apparently, the film is available on a Special Edition DVD which presents the film in a widescreen print of the original 85-minute British theatrical release version and a full-frame edition of the shorter U.S. cut that was trimmed by 11 minutes and, reportedly, made even less sense than before. While I did managed to acquire just the former, my copy was ever so slightly off in terms of lip-synching on my cheap DVD player model so I elected to watch it on my PC monitor which, while solving this problem, severely window box the image!! Truly a case of a hounded (by the way, the 'monster' itself is here no bigger than any normal mutt as if anyone was truly expecting anything fearsome and, rather than attack Sir Henry, it actually befriends him at first sight!) movie through and through.
P.S. Recently, I was stunned to learn that a friend of mine had tried watching Billy Wilder's ill-fated but nonetheless revered THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (1970) and found it "revolting" (and he's usually a big fan of the director!); I really have to wonder, at this point, just what he'd make of this one!