SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

An Exercise In Nonsense

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

With all the comic talent from the British Isles gathered into one film the Peter Cook/Dudley Moore version of The Hound Of The Baskervilles should have come out better than it was. Far from the best of Peter and Dudley, but it wasn't all that bad.Certainly Baker Street purists will be offended, but they're always offended in the least deviation of a Sherlock Holmes story. Then again you would have to change the plot of the story because a man being torn to shreds is hardly a good subject for humor.Knowing the plot of this most well known of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories about Sherlock Holmes the deviations can be plotted like on a road map. Peter Cook is as usual a most detached Sherlock Holmes, but not because he's constantly analyzing. He's got a mother who is constantly urging him into matrimony and not with Dr. Watson. And the man needs a vacation so he goes to Paris to sow a little bit of his version of wild oats.As Holmes fans know, he does dispatch Watson out to Baskerville Hall to lay the ground work while he dons disguise. The time apart from Watson here though introduces the comedy team of Dudley Moore and Kenneth Williams of the Carry On series. Williams made a specialty of playing silly twits and that's exactly how he plays the Baskerville heir who is the object of a fiendish plot to murder him and get his inheritance. I like him here as I do on the Carry On series.I can never give a bad review to a film that has Hugh Griffith who was blessed with those maniacal eyes with which he did so much in film roles. They helped get him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his Arab sheik in Ben-Hur. He plays a swamp character on the famous Grimpen Mire.As for the fabled hound from hell. Well let's say he's been ballyhooed quite a bit.This isn't the best work of Cook and Moore, but it's not all that bad.

There are very few movies I've seen that I found so monumentally awful that I felt compelled to watch them again because I was convinced they could not have really been as bad as I thought. I have not yet re-watched Paul Morrissey's Hound of the Baskervilles, but I intend to. Until then, we'll have to go with my initial, head-spinning thoughts on the movie.To say this adaptation of the classic Arthur Conan Doyle story (screenplay by director Morrissey and co-stars Dudley Moore and Peter Cook) is terrible is an understatement. It is beyond terrible. Other than a few chuckles and maybe one actual laugh the movie is brutally unfunny. The look of the film is drab and unattractive, the pacing is slow and the filmmaking is sloppy and scattershot to the point of seeming downright amateurish.Moore and Cook, two comic geniuses, enthusiastically dive into their characters but cannot wring any joy or even mild amusement out of the material. The rest of the cast, made up mostly of familiar faces that populated classic British cinema in the 60s and 70s, appear utterly confused, as if they walked on the set and Morrissey just turned on the camera and said "action." It appears Morrissey is trying to recapture the gleeful irreverence of his Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula but forgot how he managed to accomplish it. The outrageous gore, bizarre characters and non-sequitur dialog juxtaposed against such lush and pastoral settings made for a pair of genuinely idiosyncratic films (which were shot back-to-back).That same magic never materializes in Hound of the Baskervilles. It is an utterly lifeless movie. The actors' performances are akin to witnessing the death throes of a drowning animal desperately trying to stay afloat. That mixed with the mind-numbingly awful screenplay and leaden direction results in an intensely unpleasant and uncomfortable experience.Considering Morrissey's roots with Andy Warhol's Factory, one wonders if that were not his intention all along.

I've seen a number of different film adaptations of The Hound of the Baskervilles, so I thought I might enjoy a spoof of this familiar story. Also, I've seen some of the other work Peter Cook and Dudley Moore did together and thought they might have a chance at success with such a project. My reaction, well if you've been on IMDb for any length of time, you've probably seen the well thought out response "It Sux" when someone is asked about their opinion on a given film. Well, "It Sux" pretty well sums up my feelings to the abomination that is The Hound of the Baskervilles. It is a complete waste of time and effort. I can't imagine how two talented individuals like Cook and Moore could have concocted such a disaster of a film. It's nothing short of a chore to sit through the thing. It's the complete opposite of funny. In addition to Cook and Moore, there's a good cast assembled including Joan Greenwood, Denholm Elliot, Hugh Griffith, and the usually entertaining Terry-Thomas. I actually started to feel embarrassed for these talented actors. What were they thinking? And where in the world did the scenes taken from The Exorcist come from? I don't remember any pea soup spitting in Doyle's original work.I actually bought The Hound of the Baskervilles on DVD. I'm glad it only set me back $3, because the 2/10 I've rated the movie may actually be overstating things a bit.

I bought this on CD. Big mistake. I should have looked it up on IMDb first. I figured I'd add to my "Holmes" collection. This has nothing to do with Holmes. It has nothing to do with "British humor" either - I think some of Cleese is hilarious and I own everything Sellers has ever done. This is just a pure-and-simple complete waste of time. It's not funny. Whoever was in charge of casting must have been throwing darts at a board loaded with the photos of wannabe comedians. My God! Who is that thing cast as Sir Henry Baskerville? It's not well-acted. The plot is ridiculous. The dialogue is childish and in many cases reeks of non-sequitur. And Sherlock Holmes's MOTHER?!?!?!? Puh-leeze. I've walked out of three movies in my life - the musical version of Lost Horizon, Paint Your Wagon (a MUSICAL starring Lee Marvin, believe it or not), and this thing.