Casting is a good three quarters of the battle when it comes to Sherlock Holmes films. Cast a decent enough Holmes and Watson and you can get away with an awful lot – so long as your leading men look good and convinces you that they are indeed the Great Detective and his faithful companion in deduction. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to cast Canadian actor Matt Frewer – the erstwhile Max Headroom – as Baker Street’s most famous resident was clearly having no truck with this simple truth. Sure, he’s tall and gaunt of feature but it requires something more than that to be a convincing Holmes. Elsewhere he’s frequently proved himself a capable and likable actor, but here…? Oh dear…
Whoever it was who cast him did it no fewer than four times in a series of made-for-television features for The Hallmark Channel, this being the last following The Hound of the Baskervilles (2000), The Sign of the Four (2001) and The Royal Scandal (2001). Written and directed by Rodney Gibbons it is a freshly minted adventure with virtually no ties whatsoever to Conan Doyle beyond the leading characters – it certainly has nothing to do with The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire. Holmes and Watson (Kenneth Walsh, far better in his role than Frewer is in his) are retained by Brother Marstoke (Shawn Lawrence) to look into a murder at the St Justinian’s monastery in Whitechapel. Marstoke and several other believe that it was the work of Desmodo, a vampire-like demon that wiped out a mission in Guyana though Holmes has a more mundane killer in mind. But the bat-like creature continues to claim victims in the East End of London…
Cheap, dreary and tedious, The Case of the Whitechapel Vampire recycles the use of a three-pronged garden weeder from the Rathbone/Bruce Holmes adventure The Scarlet Claw (1944) but comes not even remotely close to matching that film’s quality. Gibbons stirs in references to Dracula (the fictional Demeter Street and Renfield Place are two of the London locations), the Jack the Ripper killings (Whitechapel was of course the Ripper’s chosen hunting ground but there’s also a glimpse of the words “From Hell” as part of a message painted on a wall in blood) and a hint or two of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (murders in a cloistered religious community) to absolutely no avail whatsoever.
The resulting mess is completely derailed by Frewer’s fatal misunderstanding of Holmes who he plays as a rather camp and faintly ludicrous figure, certainly lacking in any of the authority we expect from the role. It’s not saying much to note that he’s better here than in his previous three outings in the role but that’s no comfort at all. It pains me to say it as I rather like Frewer elsewhere but he really is one of the worst screen Holmes’ of all times, thoroughly unconvincing and constantly let down by Gibbon’s uninspired script. It could have been anyone investigating the mystery for all the impact that Holmes and Watson make on the proceedings and only Holmes’ haughty dismissal of the supernatural and, in the film’s only daring step, religion suggest the detective we know and love.
But no actor could really have done that much with Gibbons’ colourless script. He himself can do nothing with it, this being one Holmes case notably devoid of any suspense or mystery. We know from the start that there’ll be a “Scooby-Doo” ending where the supernatural will be unmasked as the doings of a mere mortal and sure enough that’s exactly the tedious path the film takes. There’s little as soul destroying as watching a film and working out where it’s going within the first ten minutes and The Case of the Whitechapel Vampire is a prime example of that. Having seen the rest of the films in the series I can’t say I was particularly surprised or disappointed at the way things played out – just resigned to the fact that if I was going to stay the course I was going to be bored and unrewarded. On that score, the film succeeded admirably.
The EOFFTV Review 