Agatha Christies:New Mysteries

A&E, ITV and Chorion have done it again with an excellent release of new Poirot mysteries. These four new mysteries were filmed in the fall of 2003 with David Suchet starring as Hercule Poirot. All of the adaptations are well made with great attention paid to sets, costumes and details of the 1930s era in which the stories are set.

The stories are all well done. Specifically, The Hollow (89 minutes) and Sad Cypress (93 minutes) remind me more of the past Poirot series and are my personal favourites. They are good mysteries set in England.

Death on the Nile (97 minutes) will always be compared to the Peter Ustinov movie of 1977. And while this adaptation is very good, I will always enjoy the film version more.

My least favourite of the quartet is Five Little Pigs (93 minutes) due in large part to the filming style employed for a portion of the story (a sort of handycam effect to portray flash back sequences).

Viewers familiar with the Poirot series may be disappointed that Hastings, Japp and Lemon are not in these films. However, if you like Poirot and Agatha Christie mysteries, this box-set is worth a look.

The Poirot films from the 80's and 90's had a lighter feel (Hastings or no Hastings) and seemed more "optimistic" than do the more recent films. Poirot (still played to perfection by David Suchet) seems darker, almost sinister. I won't go into much plot detail as other reviewers have already done so.

This DVD set contains:

1) Death on the Nile: You probably already know the story. A large pleasure boat takes tourists along the Nile, a series of peculiar happenings take place, and everyone's a suspect... and everyone gets a little jumpy as the bodies begin to pile up.
We could've done without the people on shore mooning the tourists, but I reckon the director wanted realism. Ick.
But the film was enjoyable.

2) Sad Cypress: A darker story about love, betrayal, murder (of course), and the usual A.C. twists and turns. The dream sequence was particularly creepy, and over all, we didn't care for this film.

3) The Hollow: Again, dark, but with some excellent twists and turns that surprised even me (and I usually see most things coming, unfortunately). I/we liked this film.

4) Five Little Pigs: A young woman wants Poirot's help to bring a killer to justice and to clear her mother's name. Her mother *must* be innocent, the woman reasons, even though a court found her mother guilty and she was hung for the crime. And so the story begins.
But it doesn't begin here.
The story began long ago. Hence the story is told mostly in a dizzying series of flashbacks (and some of it seems to have been shot using a handheld camera that didn't have a "steady cam" feature, so the picture wobbles and jerks all over the place) and is rather convoluted and we felt the film could've been shortened considerably without losing anything. Or maybe edited better. Either way, this wasn't our favourite, and the ending left a bad taste in my mouth.
The story is clever, don't get me wrong, and the different points of view of characters of certain ages and in certain stages is fascinating, but if injustice gets your blood boiling, maybe give this film a miss.

As with all the Poirot dvds I've seen, this set also has minimal Extras or Special Features.

This set isn't one of our favourite Poirot sets, but we have watched three of the four a couple of times now (we watched the fourth one only once), and it was an enjoyable way to spend a couple of cold winter evenings... hot chocolate, feet up, a fire blazing, and Poirot :-)

Hercule Poirot is a fussy, brainy little Belgian, and he seems like an unlikely detective in a series of veddy veddy British murder mysteries. But Agatha Christie's most likable detective turns up again in a quartet of new TV movies: one of her most popular, and three of her most atmospheric and baffling.

"Death on the Nile" introduces us to a lethal love triangle: a beautiful heiress, her penniless new husband, and the vibrant ex-girlfriend, who is also an ex-pal of the heiress. Soon Linnett Doyle (Emily Blunt) is dead, and her ex-pal and widowed husband are the only people who COULDN'T have done it. But it seems that she had a wealth of enemies, including a disgruntled communist, pearl thief, and a drunken romance novelist. And it's up to Hercule Poirot to figure out what really did happen...

Another lethal love triangle crops up in "Sad Cypress." An old woman dies, seemingly of natural causes, leaving her vast estate to her young relative Elinor (Elisabeth Dermot-Walsh). But when Elinor's fiancee leaves her for lovely Mary Gerard (Kelly Reilly), Mary turns up dead -- and the only suspect is Elinor. Poirot knows she wanted to -- but did she?

In "The Hollow," doctor John Christow (Jonathan Cake) is shot at the poolside, and his timid wife is found holding the gun. Love is the probable answer: Was it his steel-nerved mistress (Megan Dodds), the young man in love with her (Jamie de Courcey) his quiet and seemingly stupid wife (Claire Price), or an angry ex-flame (Lysette Anthony) with whom he had had a quickie in the pavilion? Only Hercule Poirot is clever enough to unravel this bizarrely simple mystery...

"Five Little Pigs" takes Poirot to a "cold case" -- fourteen years after Caroline Crale (Rachael Stirling) seemingly murdered her cheating husband Amyas (Aidan Gillen), her daughter Lucy (Aimee Mullins) asks Poirot to somehow clear her long-dead mother's name. He agrees to look into it, and soon finds a pattern of clues centering on Amyas, Caroline, her younger sister, his mistress/model, and his boyhood friend...

Don't expect these movies to have quite the same feel as the TV series. Those stories were lightened by the presence of clueless sidekick Hastings; without him, a darker tone enters the movies. Sure, the English counterpoints that Hastings and Miss Lemon brought are missing, but it doesn't make these movies bad, merely different.

"Death on the Nile" is the only movie that can be compared to another production; Salome Otterbourne is dour rather than funny, and the film has a lack of Egyptian settings. It's okay, but not great. The other movies are really the outstanding ones, especially since the filmmakers include Christie's studies of "the psychology."

They are also populated by a bevy of wonderful characters: ice-cold artists, flaky ladies-of-the-manor, seductive bombshells, imperious heiresses, and bewitching teenagers. And they are set in a variety of different places, like English manorhouses, cruise ships, and volatile artists' households.

British actor Suchet has been playing the dapper Belgian for years, and has surpassed Peter Ustinov as the best Poirot. He's in good form here, with little details that show us Poirot's "little grey cells" and his passion for order. One of his best scenes has Poirot faking poison symptoms, then looking up with a catlike smirk at the would-be murderer.

Other Poirot movies have been made, but in the meantime, check out the "New Mysteries Collection." The Egyptian film is rather lackluster, but the remaining three are solid, suspenseful, and intelligent.