I downloaded some movies onto my phone for my trip to Nicaragua this year and this was one of them. After a few days of crazy Nicaraguan adventures, my girlfriend and I wanted to watch something, and this is what we put on.
The Sign of the Four was one of the longer Sherlock Holmes books, and I read all of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 2021. I did vaguely remember this as it went, especially the revels as to the killers and their particular "characteristics" I guess you could say.
Holmes and Watson are there and they get summoned from Baker Street to a case involving a seeming mystery: a dead man in a locked room with no seeming sign of struggle or signs of the murderer. They start to assemble the clues and paint an odd picture involving one man with a wooden leg, missing jewels, and another killer who's either a child or child sized.
Stuffy and talky, this hit the spot. I still maintain if you're in the mood for this type of thing its no burden. The mystery isn't really a mystery, nor was it in the book. Meaning there is not a moment where there's a suspicion of someone who is later not the murderer. They basically know who the murderer should be and then just have to find the dudes.
Relying on old tropes like evil midgets and disfigured maniacs, the funny thing about Sign of the Four is a "other" types of horror this perhaps either invented or added to. We still see horror and killer movies in which the killers are clearly these types of people, and its funny to see it as a Sherlock Holmes movie. These feature a lot more monsters and atypical storylines one might assume, and if you though they were all magnifying glasses and pocket watches, you have something else coming.
I give this a solid 3.5.
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