There was a moment, around 1984 to 1986, when every effects-driven family adventure was trying to be the next Amblin film. Wonder and upheaval in equal parts. BMX-powered high-adventure with the wide-eyed wish fulfilment of a Pepsi commercial. It wasn’t always easy to pull off, even when Amblin was trying to be Amblin.
Young Sherlock Holmes (released at the tail end of 1985) was one of those times. And it’s worth pulling off the shelf, if only to see how weird things could get.
Spielberg produced it. Barry Levinson directed it. Chris Columbus wrote it. ILM cooked up the visual effects, including the first fully CGI character in a live-action feature – a Pixar-created stained-glass knight who still looks as cool and creepy as any modern VFX. Everything about this movie screams big deal. But somehow, it got sidelined.
Maybe because it’s not a kids’ movie, not really. It opens with a man hallucinating his roast chicken into a monster and ends with a full-blown death cult stabbing teenagers in the ribs. But the tone is slightly off. Not broken – just unstable. One scene’s a murder mystery. The next is a buddy comedy. Then it’s the Victorian Muppet acid trip. The whole thing feels like it was stitched together from five different pitch meetings.
That might be why its on the flop side of the scale. The audience couldn’t find the edges. Kids were confused. Adults didn’t show up. Sherlockians were annoyed. But for some of us, it landed anyway – because it was big, dramatic, ambitious, and just weird enough to feel like something special, maybe ahead of its time.
It’s trying to franchise Sherlock Holmes as a teenage Indiana Jones – and almost gets there. Nicholas Rowe is great. Sophie Ward is there to shackle the film with some emotional weight. The school scenes hum with a sort of neo-gothic Hogwarts-before-Hogwarts mood, and the hallucination sequences are proper Amblin nightmare fuel: food phantasmagoria, graveyards, occult sacrifices. But like all ‘Steven Spielberg Presents’ movies, the practical effects are cutting-edge, the matte paintings are used to perfection, and everything is beautifully lit and scored.
So yeah, it was trying too hard. But that’s why its a fascinating watch.
It’s a proper forgotten shelf-warmer from the peak VHS rental era: the kind of movie you’d have picked because of the Amblin brand recognition alone, but most kids didn’t play Young Sherlock Holmes in the schoolyard, ask for deerstalker caps or magnifying glasses to perfect their next Halloween costume. It didn’t capture the public imagination. All of the adventure remained on the screen, and very little of its magic pushed into the real world.