Hickory Dickory Dock (1995)

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

There is a lot to like in this longer episode: Japp and especially Miss Lemon have prominent roles, a lot of humor (some of it laugh out loud), an interesting setting in a student hotel, we learn more about Japp's and Miss Lemon's private lives, a quirky and cool motif of a mouse running throughout the show with good repetition of the nursery rhyme, an intriguing cast of characters, interesting puzzles and a resolution to all of the puzzles that make sense. The story starts inauspiciously enough - Miss Lemon, ever the perfect secretary, has made multiple mistakes in a letter. Upon questioning, she tells Poirot that there have been a number of thefts at the student hotel her sister runs. Poirot goes to the hotel and investigates the generally petty thefts. Unfortunately, soon thereafter a murder occurs. There are suspects galore and a sufficiently intricate plot with yet an additional murder. While murder is appalling, we do not know the victims sufficiently well enough to feel a great sadness at their deaths so what is memorable in this episode are the way Poirot solves the puzzles, the humor and the depiction of the friendship between Poirot, Japp and Miss Lemon. This makes for a satisfying and most enjoyable episode. Highly recommended.

The annoying mouse and lullaby really got to me and really had nothing to do with the story...It's something I would have done my 1st year in film school. Very sad. Additionally, the story just seemed to drag on for no apparent reason...there were too many things just thrown in there that had nothing to do with the story, which makes me feel that the creative team didn't really know what they were doing, or just that it should have been shorter...which would have been a blessing, not a crime. As I have just watched all of the episodes up to this point over the past week...I'd have to say that this was by far the worst, and I just wanted to warn others not to start with this one.

The original book of this was set in the 1950s but that won't do for the TV series because most people watch for the 1930s style. Ironically the tube train near the end was a 1950s train painted to look like a 1930s train so the Underground can play at that game too. Hanging the storyline on a plot about the Jarrow March was feeble but the 50s version had students who were beginning to think about the world around them so I suppose making them think about the poverty of the marchers is much the same thing. All the stuff about Japp having to cater for himself was weak too but they had to put something in to fill the time. This would have made a decent half hour show or they could have filmed the book and made it a better long show. It is obvious this episode is a victim of style over content.

These Suchet-led adaptations of Poirot are frustratingly uneven because the producers brought in a different creative team for each one. Sometimes they understand the strength of the source material, and other times they go off on some unrelated direction that they graft onto the plot.They already start with a disadvantage. Suchet produces an entertaining character for sure. But the foibles of Christie's detective were all found to be assets in how he approached a problem. It was almost as if he were from some alien world where people thought differently and so could "see" things we could not.In this case, he's just a comic man who incidentally solves mysteries as if that were another eccentricity. So instead of the puzzle and his attempts to unwind it, we get:-- a bunch of buffoonery about Poirot's and Japp's eating habits-- some excessive cinematic nonsense about a mouse who appears through the story-- in an unrelated insertion, we have the chanting of a nursery rhyme every time something bad is happeningThis is the worst of a bad lot. Please avoid it.Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.