This film is another case of false advertising, just like Bathory. The Case of the Whitechapel Vampire was included in a collection of vampire films, so I had to assume it would be one.
It wasn’t.
As soon as the film started and I saw the name Sherlock Holmes mentioned in the opening credits, I knew that – in all likelihood – this was not going to be a vampire film but an ordinary Holmes-based mystery-thriller with a vampire theme. And that is exactly what this is. It plays on supernatural elements while staying completely within the natural realm, in the same manner as The Hound of the Baskervilles did. I am a bit surprised that I had never heard of this film before, but of course I know that there are hundreds of non-Doylean Holmes films out there, so it would be hard to keep track of all of them.
When a monk is found dead at an Abbey in London’s Whitechapel district, rumours start to spread about a vampire attack. The abbot of the monastery (played by Shawn Lawrence) has witnessed too many strange things during the order’s missionary work in Guyana to outright discard that possibility, and he asks Sherlock Holmes to investigate the death which the police have already dismissed as an accident.
The abbey in Whitechapel houses a collection of South American idols, at least one of which looks like a depiction of a vampire bat. It is, we learn, a demon from Guyana called Desmodo. Two employees of the Abbey hail from Guyana, and they seem convinced that this demon exists. Moreover, they suspect the abbot’s friend Dr Chagas (Neville Edwards) to be a dhampir. With so much fear and superstition around, Holmes has to work his way through that fog in order to get to the truth, with Scotland Yard in the person of Inspector Jones (Michel Perron) being more of a hindrance than a help.
Apart from the vampire superstitions just mentioned, there is at least one Bram Stoker “Easter Egg” (a street name), as well as an “angry peasant mob” that you might see as an homage to an old-timey monster-film trope.
As this isn’t a vampire film, however, I shall try to judge it as a detective story instead.
I do not think I have ever seen any of the Sherlock Holmes stories starring Matt Frewer and Kenneth Welsh, but I cannot say for sure. These two are actually an excellent casting choice for the roles of Holmes and Watson, but unfortunately the director (Rodney Gibbons, who also wrote the script) either failed to keep them in check, or even encouraged their overacting. Welsh should be an excellent Watson, but he plays a slightly exaggerated version of him, let’s say a 110%-Watson. With Frewer it is far worse – he outdoes what I might consider an appropriate Holmes-performance by at least 30%.
In other words: performances that are actually rather close to a perfect depiction of Holmes and Watson are more-often-than-not turning into accidental caricatures. It makes it difficult for me to take them completely seriously. As I have not seen any of their other films, I am unable to say if this was merely a problem in this particular film, or a general problem with their “run” as Holmes and Watson.
Some of the ordinary, working-class people are also caricatures rather than real characters, but I feel this happens in other Sherlock Holmes adaptations as well, so it did not stick out as much for me. While the acting in this film is generally good, I would describe most of the major supporting characters as stock figures.
The sets, props (including scientific bat specimens) and costumes all looked the part. Twenty to thirty monks and nuns all dressed in a grey habit (as well as a severe lack of upper- and middle-class women in elaborate Victorian costumes) surely took pressure off the wardrobe department and helped to keep the budget down.
And since we are talking about the “world” of the film: There are two odd (and unnecessary) aspects of the film which see modern-day points-of-view projected backwards into the Victorian era. The film talks about environmental concerns, which certainly existed back then in a way, but is does so in a manner which must have been unknown to Victorians. More importantly, the film depicts xenophobia – certainly a problem in Victorian London – but again drops one or two lines that are modern projections about racism that should not have been in the script. Since these scenes all feature Frewer’s Sherlock Holmes, a character that I have difficulty believing in anyway, these scenes contributed to taking me “out” of the story and its world.
As for the core mystery and Holmes’s detective work, there are a number of convenient coincidences, but these fit within the theme of the story. The film also follows the somewhat tiresome “Murder-She-Wrote“-style of filmmaking whereby a number of clues are sprinkled throughout the story and later revealed to be significant turning points in Holmes’s investigation. As is mostly the case with this approach, it is not even the “sprinkling” that is annoying, but the painful re-telling of these scenes in the concluding minutes of the film. It seems particularly clunky here, a sort of backwards-exposition, an unnatural conversation in which four people keep telling each other things that most of them already know.
This is not a bad film. It is an entertaining and well-produced detective story, even by TV standards. But it comes with a number of problems which make it difficult for me to fully enjoy it. If you like Sherlock Holmes, there are probably better films out there. This is not a film to buy and put in your DVD-player for your weekly film-night. This is more of a film you watch late at night when you come across it on TV by accident and there is nothing better on.
rating: roughly 6.0 to 6.5 out of 10
Addendum:
Since I was more than just mildly irritated by Frewer’s Holmes, I started googling around a bit to see what other people thought of him.
On his blog, The Merry Ghost Hunter, Tim Prasil has a very interesting section looking at a large number of Sherlock Holmes actors. Prasil had this to say about Frewer’s performance in another Gibbons-directed Holmes film, The Royal Scandal:
“[H]e’s good when Holmes is serious […]. When he’s trying to play the jovial side of the great detective, though, Frewer can come off as Bertie Wooster-style goofy, and his accent begins to feel influenced by the Dick Van Dyke school of British accents (though mockingly upper crust instead of cartoonishly Cockney). I’m tempted to give a sidelong sneer to the director, Rodney Gibbons, since Frewer shows he does have a better performance in him. He just needed to be told to reel it in at times.”
[ source: https://merryghosthunter.wordpress.com/2016/02/16/in-the-shadow-of-rathbone-matt-frewer-in-the-royal-scandal ]
Pretty much aligns with the impression I got from The Case of the Whitechapel Vampire …
Vampire Film Reviews 