Horrorfest 2018: Sherlock Holmes Faces Death

The famous series of classic Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson started at Fox with 2 movies but then moved to Universal for 12 more sequels. The ones that lean more towards spookiness (with old dark houses or passageways or seemingly supernatural monsters) get to “count” as Universal horror movies.

The strength of all of these movies, of course, is the way Rathbone’s Holmes and Bruce’s Watson play off of each other with perfect chemistry. Purists may not that Bruce’s Watson is more bumbling than the original, but it works in this dynamic with Rathbone’s near-perfect Holmes. Rathbone is inspired casting, because you might be tempted to put a hero in the role of Holmes, but really it turns out a guy known for playing villains is ideal for someone as logically precise as Holmes. Usually villains are cold and calculating and heroes throw their emotions around. Not in this series.

This time around, Holmes arrives at a hall doubling for a home for recovering war veterans where Watson is serving as resident doctor, just in time to investigate an attempted murder, only to uncover a successful murder, and an apparent fight among the family to establish who inherits the family fortune.

There’s a cool scene where Holmes realizes the floor of one of the main rooms doubles as a life sized chess set, but my favorite part is when I realized Nicholas Meyer stole a sequence directly out of this movie for use in STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY. I always knew Meyer intended the B-plot of STAR TREK VI to double as a Sherlock-style mystery, with Spock in the role of Holmes, but I didn’t realize until I saw this movie it went right down to exactly how a certain scene is shot, when Holmes uncovers the murderer.