From the Rental Vault: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother

Gene Wilder was part of some of the funniest comedies of the 1970s, both with Mel Brooks and later Richard Pryor. In 1975, he brought Young Frankenstein co-stars Marty Feldman and Madeline Kahn with him to his directorial debut, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother. Unfortunately, he forgot to bring Brooks or much humor worth mentioning. While Wilder does play a previously unknown brother to the great detective, there's not much of an adventure and he's sure not any smarter.

Wilder is Sigurson Holmes, the younger brother of Sherlock who is intensely jealous of his older sibling. Knowing this, Sherlock decoys Sigurson into helping with a potentially explosive case of international intrigue surrounding a stolen document. Feldman is a police inspector who has an eidetic memory for anything he's ever heard and he takes on the Watson role. Together, they must aid Kahn in locating the document she was blackmailed into stealing and retrieve it before it gets into the hands of Professor Moriarty and the enemy nations bidding on it. And that paragraph makes way more sense than the movie.

Feldman has quite a few funny reaction moments, using his prominent eyes and amusing face to put much more wit into his character than the script provides. Amusing scenes here and there, like a stagecoach-top fight with oversized advertising signs, dot long stretches of Gridiron Club-styled skit-level humor that can barely quirk a lip.

Adventures seems to have many of the elements of a successful spoof comedy like Young Frankenstein or the western send-up Blazing Saddles. Unlike them, though, it never manages to put them together in any kind of coherent or comedic form. I remember laughing at this a lot more when I first saw this, but since I was 11 at the time, that seems about right.