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Best movie of this year hands down!

the audience applauded

I'll tell you why so serious

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Most Sherlock Holmes films are terrible. The Jeremy Brett TV series remains the platinum standard, against which just about everything else lags far behind. (The Basil Rathbone films are a major disappointment, because the producers were too cheap to create period films, and Rathbone's superior performance is wasted on less-than-Doyle-quality stories.) It's actually possible to talk about "A Study in Terror" with the Brett series in the same breath. It's that good.It has two flaws (which I'll get out of the way first). It was photographed with what are (by today's standards) primitive color film. The contrast is so great, that it's hard to light darker scenes to get any real sense of atmosphere (though some come close).The other is that the script, and to a lesser degree John Neville's performance, give Holmes a degree of wit and warmth lacking from Doyle's original. His is not quite the Holmes we're expecting.The strong suit is the script, with plausible situations, strong characterizations, and solid dialog.Recommended.

This was a title I had long wanted to check out (in fact, I still recall a primetime Italian TV showing of it during my childhood way back in the early 1980s!) for its placing of the world's most celebrated fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, amid the backdrop that unleashed history's most notorious crime spree i.e. the Jack The Ripper killings: the fact that the setting and time period in which both figures operated coincided was indeed fortuitous and ripe for exploitation (given that, apart from here, their confrontation was also treated in the equally fine MURDER BY DECREE {1979})! Incidentally, both pictures would attract a host of notable actors – including two, Anthony Quayle and Frank Finlay, who would appear in each title (the latter even essaying the very same role!); John Neville and Donald Houston make a good team as Holmes and his indispensable sidekick Dr. Watson – however, unlike the later effort, The Ripper's identity is not only revealed at the climax, but he is made to receive his just desserts (Fiction, in this case, having overtaken Fact)! Stylistically, the movie – as did another by the same company and scriptwriters, namely THE BLACK TORMENT (1964) – clearly owed something to the Hammer Films stable, then at the pinnacle of its successful 20-year run in the field of Gothic Horror; the second murder, in which a water trough turns red from the victim's stab wounds, is especially well handled.

A Study in Terror is directed by James Hill and written by Derek and Donald Ford. Based on characters created by Arthur Conan Doyle, it stars John Neville, Donald Houston, John Fraser, Anthony Quale, Frank Finlay and Adrienne Corri. Music is by John Scott and cinematography by Desmond Dickinson. Out of Compton Films it's an Eastman Color production. Plot pitches intrepid sleuth Sherlock Holmes (Neville) against notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper.On paper it's a filmic match made in heaven, two characters as well known as they are invariably different. One a great work of fiction, the other infamously true and dastardly. Yet the story is flat, not that it doesn't lack for quality in execution, it just lacks any suspense or dramatic verve to fully make it worthy of further visits. Cast are mostly very good, especially Neville, who makes for a lithe and autocratic Holmes, while Alex Vetchinsky's sets are period supreme. The Eastman Color, also, is a plus point, British horror always tended to have a better sheen to it in the Eastman Color lenses, so it be here for the dark deeds played out in Whitechapel, London, 1888. But ultimately, and in spite of it being an intelligent spin on the Ripper legend, story doesn't play out well enough to make it a classic of either the Ripper or Holmes cinema adaptations. 6/10

Brilliant account of the meeting between Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper.Sherlock Holmes is a better choice than American Sam Lowry in the 1959 version and James Hill's work predates later works such as "murder by decree" and "Jack the Ripper" (the MTV Version starring Michael Caine).With a small budget ,the depiction of the narrow streets of London,with the children begging for food,the soup kitchen where you have to sing the Lord's praises before having a good feed,the slaughterhouse where the butchers are carving chunks ("ain't I a better piece of meat?" says the hooker ),the shameful luxury in which indifferent snob aristocrats hide their rottenness under gold and velvet ,all rings true.As for the story itself ,it's an absorbing investigation which involves Sherlock,his faithful Watson -who can't put up with the lord's words: "being a doctor or a surgeon is not a "noble" occupation" - Lestrade,and Mycrof Holmes,the brother, who only appears in one short story and nevertheless became almost as famous as Moriarty (not present her:the Ripper was enough);he was even featured in Wilder' s largely overlooked " Private life of SH".He is portrayed by the always reliable Robert Morley."A study in terror" should be considered one of the best "Ripper/Holmes " in a topflight competition.