Gads, I did see a screening of the 2004 pilot at one of the Festivals, but have no memory of anyone named Sophia.  Was she Willie's girlfriend?

G.

Good news!  The title of the movie, btw, is Who are you, Polly Maggoo? (Qui etes-vous, Polly Maggoo?)

There is a topic in the archives with some fabou screen-captures from this movie...

G.

Heavens to Murgatroyd! 

At least this explains that persistent odor of Frankincense and Myrrh I've been noticing today.

Thank you all!  May you all continue to love and adulate and enjoy Dark Shadows, the best TV show of all time!

cheers!

Gothique

What fun!  I was staying with a friend in Connecticut last weekend and she has a cable tier that includes something called "The Chiller Network," and we watched a recording she had made from it of House of DS, followed by some Kolchak episodes the following morning.  Excellent stuff!

I've had the Kolchak DVD set on my shopping list for years now.  I loved Ruth McDevitt's character on that show.

G.

It's on the hall table in the foyer.  So, it's indoors.

G.

I could swear that Buzz was the original owner of at least one of Cassandra's lacquered black wigs.

The post about Edward's moustache reminds me of this episode where Edward and Quentin are having a verbal sparring match and the tape cuts and Quentin is laughing ... I always thought that Louis lost his moustache while he was making some epically pompous speech.

G.

Has the new season of the Lair aired yet?

Despite the awfulness of season one, I watched the whole thing in two sittings when a friend loaned it to me a few months back.  The ending was STRONGLY reminiscent of a certain storyline on DS--as were other elements in the story--such as that portrait!

G.

I don't agree with Vasquez, and it sounds to me as if he should be playing video games, not reviewing movies.

In the original Lugosi Dracula film, he had those wonderful lines:  "To die... to be really dead ... that must be glorious!"  The theme of the reluctant vampire with a ruthless streak continued in the underrated Dracula's daughter, and one could recite a long litany of vampire films that have spun out the notion of the vampire's divided nature with endless juicy variations.

I do agree that there has been a lot of ripping off of Miss Rice in recent years.  IMO that's not necessarily a bad thing--I thought  the 1990s show Forever Knight showed that her ideas could be incorporated in a modulated form to produce compelling story-telling, and from what I heard from friends, many folks thought the same about Moonlighting.  I'm not familiar enough with the Buffy/Angel franchise to comment upon that.  Despite its excessively pretty lead actor, Blood ties struck me as an example of watered-down Rice that badly needed an injection of fresh inspiration. 

Critiques such as the one Vasquez is offering up are very thick on the ground in the blogosphere these days.  While amusing (perhaps) to read, they hardly do justice to the films and shows with which he's making free.

I am not up on the new "Twilight" book series and films, so am not really commenting on that.  The notion of vampires as mindless killing machines seems to owe more to "Night of the Living Dead" and its endless barrage of sequels than it does to traditional literary or folk images of vampires.  (It's worth noting that the Romero franchise has had a sweeping impact upon how people think of zombies these days--the old zombies of the Val Lewton films and 1950s and 60s "voodoo melodramas" are seemingly gone forever.  In their place, we have a rather dull army of flesh-munching robots with eyeballs on detachable springs.)

cheers, G.