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Hoffmanintl
Reviews
The Class of Miss MacMichael (1978)
An Utter Reekfest...
SPOILER AHEAD!!! Absolutely atrocious melange of garbage masquerading as a film. One may assume the Faberge wanted to throw some big money into the movie industry, and apparently there were some takers. They took the money and ran, delivering this slop in return. This movie is so bad, and SO unfunny, that the "humor" can be see lumbering towards you from miles off; forgetting totally that the very basis of humor is surprise, every punchline is telegraphed an hour in advance. Nothing makes sense here; no characters are believable, and there's no plot or storyline to speak of. Events happen, and you may wonder why on Earth they included them except to take up time. Even if you were a teacher in the worst school on Earth, you would HAVE to see through this unrealistic farce of a film. You may watch it through merely to see how far it will go, or how they will end it; the film "cleverly" finishes with the same raspberry (or Bronx Cheer) that it began with--it's directed at the audience!
Young Sherlock Holmes (1985)
A Supreme Dud...
It's a real arrogance that this bomb ever got made--somebody assumed that the correct mixture of stock "ingredients", i.e., slick Hollywood production techniques, a few million dollars, plus some obvious special effects, would yield acceptable results. They couldn't have been more wrong.
Within the first 20 minutes or so, there's a definite impression that the "special effects" are the real star, and that the whole bit with "hallucinations" was created solely to cram as many of them in as possible. When a movie's not about believable people, there's no way it can be more more than a cartoon.
The actors here--given that they're mainly younger--don't have much of a chance in competing with the effects or working with the bad writing. The cardboard "Sherlock Holmes" character lacks the wit and cleverness of the real Holmes, and considering the original's inerrant sense of applied logic, the new version is a under-developed, bumbling sub-amateur. The Young Sherlock just isn't INTELLIGENT.
With weak performances and an unhealthy over-reliance on effects, only a strong thread of logical storyline could hold it all together, but there's not one. Not much that happens is really believable in any way. Being a fantasy shouldn't be a license to make everything totally ridiculous, but that's exactly what happens here. The script couldn't have looked good on paper, and someone should've noticed that early on.
There's a scene early on where Young Sherlock's "wits" are tested to discover a hidden object somewhere on a huge school campus within one hour; it's utterly unbelievable that A. He'd bother accepting such a ridiculous and impossible challenge, or B. that he'd solve it at all, given nothing whatsoever to work with. When it's explained exactly HOW it's solved, it's so patently absurd that even young children will start asking questions.
CAUTION--SPOILER AHEAD! SPOILER AHEAD!
So why is the girl killed at the end, so she can't ride off into the sunset with Sherlock, or is Young Holmes not supposed to like girls? If viewers care at all about her character (which probably isn't likely), then they should wonder why she was shot for no good reason at all. Then we get a closeup of Holmes' single, solitary tear...CHOKE!
This movie embodies the adage "Never mind the quality, feel the width"--or in this case just look at the obvious and overdone special effects and the heck with the people. There's plenty of action--things moving around--and gobs of noise, but no substance here at all. There are better ways to spend two hours of one's life than willingly undergoing this sort of torture masquerading as entertainment.