This is what I remember:

a fan has a videotape of it in her/his collection and was going to bring it to a Festival so it could be screened.  But then the fan failed to show up.  Nobody else has ever been able to track down a copy of it.  It may be one of the things that no longer exists in the studio vaults.

I remember reading a detailed description, I would guess by Amanda as Vlad mentioned.  What I recall from that is that the names were switched so that Carolyn was the Mom (who made her living offering piano lessons--perhaps this is why we see Liz playing the piano a couple of times in the very first week or two of shows), and Elizabeth was the daughter.  I think they had the theme of the mother being a recluse and not having left the house in many years.

Did you try searching Art Wallace on the Forum?  That might lead you to it.  The House would probably turn up too many hits to be of use.

G.

Julia DID get her own back by bitch-slapping more people than anybody else at Collinwood.  At last count, besides Dear Dead Cassandra (hahahaha), Julia bitch-slapped Mrs. Johnson, Joe Haskell, and Sabrina.  She may have bitch-slapped Willie at one point, too--I honestly forget.

I sometimes wonder whether bitch-slapping was an approved technique with the American Psychiatric Association, given how frequently Julia used it to help various individuals "calm" themselves...

evilly grinning,

Gothique

Sorry to hear that these are not legit releases, but thanks Darren for letting us know.

A friend of mine turned my old VHS of The Devil's Daughter into a DVD-R, but I held onto the tape, and I'm glad I did so, now that I know about the very limited shelf-life of DVD-R's.

I agree one thousand percent about the need for decent releases of those wonderful old TV movies of the Seventies.  The one I want is The Cat Creature, with fabulous Gale Sondergaard (directed by genre afficionado Curtis Harrington--now something of a legend in his own right).  I bought a bootleg of it on eBay and the qualtiy is beyond shitty.  Watching even that did bring back happy memories, I must confess.

G.

An interesting postscript to this thread:  last night, rewatching some scenes from the extraordinary Anchor Bay DVD release of George Romero's fabulous 1972 sleeper Season of the Witch, I noticed that the hereditary Witch tapped the Queen of Swords during a Tarot reading and called it "the Wicked Woman."  Still more interesting, the card referred to a woman with whom the husband of a friend of the heroine's was having an adulterous affair.

I should go check Eden Gray and see whether she describes the Q of Swords as "the Wicked Woman" in this way...

G.

Wow, what a fantastic photo, and with the divine Ian Ogilvy, too!  Thanks for that link, Mr. Retzev!

I found the She Beast a crashing bore when I saw it on tape years ago, but I will have to revisit it, thanks to that new edition.

G.

[spoiler]Well, don't forget that when we last saw them, Sabrina had suffered a really terrible attack at the hands of Barnabas.  When Barnabas disappeared and Julia, who was the main person trying to help Chris, seems to have wandered off into emotional la-la land before her own "transcendence" into Parallel Time, Chris probably decided it was time to get Sabrina and Amy the hell out of Collinsport.

It would have only taken about 3 sentences more of dialogue in that scene in the drawing room in the Summer of 1970 to sum this up.  As was so often the case, however, the writers couldn't be bothered.

I have to wonder whether this snippet of dialogue was inserted into that scene because DC still hoped that Briscoe and Nickerson would one day return to this show.  It's hard to know at this point.[/spoiler]

G.

I've been revisiting some of the 1991 remake episodes of our beloved series.  I was tickled to see that the writers brought back the old notion of a Tarot card identified by the Countess du Pres as "the wicked woman."  As we've discussed on a number of occasions on this forum, there is no such card in any orthodox edition of the Tarot.

I had speculated that the Countess may have been in the habit of regarding one of the standard cards of the Tarot as "the Wicked Woman" because it tended to reveal the presence of a female intent on mischief.  I believe I speculated that the card might have been one of the Queens.

I was amused to see two different episodes in which the Countess exclaimed "the wicked woman!" in the midst of a Tarot reading and on both occasions, the camera showed us which card she had just drawn.  On the first occasion it was the Queen of Pentacles, and on the second, the Queen of Swords.

Of course, there is still a broad streak of anachronism here.  There were no commercially available tarot decks around in the 1780s/90s, and a French aristocrat such as the Countess would have undoubtedly commissioned her own deck.  It would have given the French names for the Major and Minor Arcana.  Pentacles did not come into play on Tarot cards until the publication of the so-called "Rider Waite Deck" (the work of mystic and artist Pamela Colman Smith, working from descriptive outlines supplied by Golden Dawn initiate and master A. E. Waite) in 1910.  A deck created in the 1780s or earlier would like have used coins (deniers) in the suit that eventually became diamonds in standard playing cards and pentacles in most Tarot decks.  This was the case with the Marseilles deck and the popular Swiss "IJJ" deck around 1800--either would have been a suitable prop for the Countess to use.  Instead, however, the production crew provided her with what looks like a typical 1980s "Aquarian Age" type deck, complete with card designations in English.

Well, after all, the show was "filmed on location in Beverly Hills"!

I have to say that this time around, I was more impressed than I expected to be by Lysette Anthony's performance as Angelique.  It's really unfortunate that the breakneck pace of the series, and the calibre of the scripts, did not give her more to do in the role.  I've seen her in UK productions and she's a fine craftswoman as an actress.

G.

Greetings, Cousins--

I was intrigued to see a new entry on Barbara Steele's IMDB page the other day.  Barbara has a role (I think a cameo, really) in something called Her Morbid Desires, the work of LA scene figure Edward Plumb.  A trailer (no appearance by Ms. Steele, unfortunately) can be viewed here:

http://bloodbyte.com/IrenaBelle/HMD_IBFilms.html

It looks, on the basis of this trailer, like a direct-to-DVD production, but could be a fun backdrop to a Halloween party (I forecast an October release date).

G.