Dr. Amy Winslow (Debrah Farentino) lives and works in San Francisco. She is a pediatric surgeon currently assisting in the trauma center when a man is brought in having been mauled by a tiger. The man was a police detective.
Amy arrives at the home of Mrs. Hudson (Joy Coghill). She had been invited for lunch. Mrs. Hudson’s husband had suffered a stroke the previous year and Amy saved his life. He has since died but was the caretaker of the home that Mrs. Hudson still lives in. The house was originally purchased by a man named Captain Basil in 1889. The original caretaker was Mr. Hudson’s grandfather. Basil disappeared but a trust fund kept the house going. At least until now. The house is going up for sale and Mrs. Hudson hopes that Amy will buy it and keep her on as housekeeper. Amy is struggling to pay for the house that her parents lived in and can’t afford another mortgage for a house outside of the city.
While going into the cellar to pick out a bottle of wine Amy finds earthquake damage to the wine rack. When she tries to fix it she stumbles onto a hidden room with electricity furnished by a steam generator. Amy accidentally disrupts the electric flow from the generator. A device in the hidden room opens and thaws the body of a man inside it. The thawed out man claims to be Sherlock Holmes (Anthony Higgins). He says he invented a method of cryogenically freezing himself. It takes some time for Amy to believe any of this.
Holmes’ first case is to find the grandson of Henry Moriarty, James Moriarty Booth (Ken Pogue). Forty-five years ago there was a robbery in his secret room. An old man and a boy broke in and stole a box that held his identification, and jewels that he was going to use in the future to reestablish himself. They were interrupted. The old man was killed and the boy got away with the box. The old man was Moriarty’s brother Henry and the boy his grandson, James Moriarty Booth.
Holmes' attention is also garnered by a series of strange murders that involve vicious animals. Holmes befriends a kid named Zapper (Mark Adair-Rios), who is a wiz with electronic gadgets, in his quest to find Booth. Along the way he discovers that Booth and the bizarre deaths may be linked.
“1994 Baker Street: Sherlock Holmes Returns” was released in 1993 and was directed by Kenneth Johnson. It is an American made for television comedy crime drama based on the character Sherlock Holmes, created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes is played by Anthony Higgins and his side kick Dr. Winslow is played by Debrah Farentino. The film was intended to be a pilot for a TV series for CBS called “Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Winslow”, but the series was never picked up.
Anthony Higgins also played Professor Rathe in “Young Sherlock Holmes” 1985, who, in the movie, would later change his name to Moriarty.
If you’re a Holmes purist you probably won’t like it. Since I am not, I thought it was a lot of fun. It does get compared a lot to the other Sherlock Holmes time travel movie “The Return of Sherlock Holmes” 1987. Both have Sherlock Holmes being frozen for a hundred or so years and getting a new partner that is a woman. Other than that they are very different plots so they can be enjoyed for what they are. A variation on the Sherlock Holmes theme.