Is there anyone else there who had to swallow a MIGHTY guffaw at Trask's line about the late Abigail's putatively "kind and gentle face" in ep. 433 (showcased in today's slide show)?  I think I actually let loose a SHRIEK when that snippet of dialogue first passed my eardrums when I finally got around to seeing this part of the show back in the Nineties.

Abigail was one of Clarice Blackburn's most Triumphant creations.  Sheer Heaven for those of us who are fans of character acting.  I adore Minerva, too, but she doesn't get as much notice from fans.  I loved Clarice's humanity in illuminating [spoiler]Minerva's despair when she comes to Collinwood to drop off a jar of preserves and realizes that "dear Gregory" is now courting Judith.  There was a lot of jealousy and bitterness in that scene, but she extracted this unwritten, barely expressed bit of sorrow and loneliness that gave the scene an extra edge.[/spoiler]

Clarice is another one who should have been awarded an honorary Daytime Emmy for her work on the series.

OTOH, the way the scene of [spoiler]Abigail's death was played in the 1991 series STILL has me giggling.  I've been revisiting that show and am looking forward to that episode. Seems to me they crammed about 3 weeks of story into ten minutes or so of air time!  LOL![/spoiler]

G.

I thought Virginia was a truly phenomenal actress.  Her performance as Samantha never fails to Wow me.

Maybe somebody will post a couple of snapshots of Virginia in the Wedding (makes note to see whether the movie is available in any format...).

G.

Well honestly Arashi, I haven't even seen the movie of the League--everything I have read about it makes me want to vomit, so why lacerate myself with the actual experience.  I asked my roommate whether Stuart Townsend removed his clothing because, if he had (particularly if he had displayed full frontal nudity), there might have been SOME incentive to see it, but, no dice.  I gather the movie was geared towards thirteen year old mall rats with videogame fetishes.

I also found it fascinating how in the comic books

[spoiler]Mina's neck wounds had not healed after the vampire's destruction.  It made me wonder whether Alan Moore had considered doing a Dracula story somewhere down the line.  It WAS one of the great moments of sheer shock when Mina's unveiling occurred--in circumstances that were already shocking to the max!  Of course, if one recalls the description of Dracula's TUSKS in the original novel, it isn't surprising that the marks he would leave would be hideous, mauling scars, rather than the discreet little holes of the classic films... In the novel, did one of the characters describe the throat marks as being "two little wounds, white with red centers"--this line is given to van Helsing in the original Lugosi film.[/spoiler]

I do go on, don't I?

G.

Oh, you'll have a great time!  I saw it twice at the Museum of Modern Art when it was shown in conjunction with a Warhol-themed Sixties show.

Just to let you know, Grayson comes on in the beginning, and then about 45 minutes go by before her next scene.  I think she has four scenes altogether in the movie.  It's a very Sixties jumble of different stories that randomly intersect, sometimes in a very incoherent manner (this sort of thing is where Tarantino got the idea for the structure of Pulp Fiction).

A detail I happened to notice on one of the viewings (it was also shown twice at a film archive here in Boston) is that Grayson's cigarettes in the movie are Marlboros.  I don't know whether this is what she actually smoked in real life.

cheers, Steve

Hi Vlad, Dracula was first associated with the Black Mass in Hammer's 1969 classic "Taste the Blood of Dracula" (now available in a truly gorgeous DVD which *radically* altered my opinion of this film--the photog is simply stunning).  They repeated this theme in subsequent films, notably "Dracula A. D. 1972" and "The Satanic Rites of Dracula."

The sexualization of Lucy's staking is in the original book, in a very sick and twisted way.  Bram Stoker seems to have had some serious issues around his own sexuality.  Granted, in the book they did not stage Lucy's staking in the over-the-top way that it was done in this new movie.  That truly was gratuitous to the point of being laughable.

Although I enjoyed watching it, there were a number of sequences where I had no idea how the actors got through their scenes without falling about in helpless laughter at the idiocy of the proceedings.

I look forward to seeing Marc Warren in future work of a better calibre.  He's in an episode of the new Dr. Who series I haven't had time to watch yet.

G.

I thought there were a couple of amusing scenes in Dameon's storyette.  The idea of someone roaming the halls of Collinwood for all eternity trapped in an Ohrbach's leisure suit is, in and of itself, pretty damn funny.  I also found it amusing that Trask and Bruno basically had a meltdown once they learned Dameon had returned.

I recall that one of those episodes, a black and white filmed kinescope, was missing its soundtrack.  Does anybody know whether MPI was able to restore the sound on the DVD release of that show?

cheers, G.

In the Fall of '69 I watched Strange Paradise on Channel 5.  I think it aired right after DS.