For Marvin Kitman to compare Ben Cross's interpretation of vampire Barnabas Collins to Jonathan Frid's and find Cross's lacking in "campy fun" is like comparing Michael Keaton's Batman to Adam West's and finding him lacking in POW! WHAM! and CRUNCH! Read More...

"Fangs a lot," loyal fans said when NBC exhumed Dark Shadows with a four-hour TV-movie in January. The Dan Curtis resuscitation of his original Gothic soap opera (which ran from 1966 to 1971 on ABC) had to be the major cultural event of the second season: I hear it got virtually 93 percent of the sets in use in vampires' homes.

A couch-potato vampire myself, I gave the revival four stakes. The remake, I thought, was well done, if you like vampire stories. It was a slice of surreal life, technically superior to the original. The cast actually memorized their lines.

Every cliché of every vampire story filmed was here -- the casket, the chains, the mist on the moor, the thunder cracking. You could fill in every word of dialogue and howl with laughter.

But the new, improved Dark Shadows didn't have the addictive quality of the original. I saw it once that Sunday night in January and had no real inclination to watch it anymore. One bit and you've seen them all.
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Dozens of people are gathered in the basement of a 55-room mansion for the filming of NBC's Dark Shadows as actor Roy Thinnes (playing an 18th-century witch hunter named Reverend Trask) is walled up behind a stack of bricks. Smoke and cobwebs fill the room. Thinnes's eyes flash with terror. Ben Cross, playing vampire Barnabas Collins, is about to complete his victim's makeshift tomb. “I beg you, I implore you – don't do this!” Trask screams as the last brick is put into place, sealing his fate forever.

It's a spine-chilling moment, but as far as Dan Curtis is concerned, it just isn't convincing enough. Curtis, the co-creator of the original Dark Shadows and the director and executive producer of NBC's new version of the cult-favorite soap opera, paces up and down, his patience wearing thin, becoming more and more unhappy with the way things are going.

“We can do better than this,” he barks. “Let's just stop messing around.” Read More...

Dark Shadows fans, take note. The prime-time resurrection of the '60s daytime soap opera premiering Jan. 13 is "very much a modern update" and a lot sexier than it was before, according to costar Lysette Anthony. Read More...