DARK SHADOWS 640
DARK SHADOWS 640
640
“I’ve done these things lots of times,”
“This house does seem scary on stormy nights, even to me.”
“I don’t like to feel my relatives. I’d like to see my relatives.”
I think when Amy turns around
this time to look at the door (for some reason; was it supposed to close?
Either way she looks creepily happy to be there; I mean would you? Amy comes
off as totally disturbed in her first few episodes), this time, it is more
close up to her than before but again, the reprise is so good it might be
exactly the same. It’s not.
I looked again and again and in the original,
we see at least three feet or so of the table or furniture the cobwebbed model
of an old ship (a schooner?) is on. In this episode, we do not. AND the model
looks less cobwebbed. In any case, the reprise is very, very close to last
episode’s cliffhanger.
We see a deer statue that was
NOT in the cliffhanger last time and possibly before entering the main Quentin
room, a pink vase? We see artwork and a sailing ship in that room.
David comes to Amy, gets her
out of there (and they seem to go out a different way than Amy came in?), and
then to show he is not afraid, he picks up the phone.
NOTE: It occurs to me that he
and she will be on the phone a lot in the next string of episodes before 1897
starts, some 60 eps from now. What strikes me is that people stood still for
this and also…it is quite brave that the show forgets all that came before 1897
and probably a lot that came during it, when it returns to the present
day…brave and stupid. It never seems to worry about the plot threads or
continuity, it just moves on.
AND on that note, it’s
amazing people still followed the show. Maybe a lot did not but they seem to,
even today. I could be 100 percent wrong but I don’t think people followed the
show for the plot threads and stories.
I think they loved the whole
ambience of the show, the characters, especially BARNABAS of course but soon,
Quentin, too (and Frid was glad that someone else was as popular so that he
could have some time off and breathe a bit more; he was probably less an
egotist then). I don’t think any gave a hoot what was going on or who was doing
what to whom, as long as they could see Barnabas, Quentin, Angelique and a few
others doing their “thing” and some mild action every ten to twelve episodes.
No one was, I guess,
examining that no one remembered “the ghosts” as BEING Quentin and very few
even mention Beth.
For his part, Selby seems
like a very nice guy.
“Hello? Hello?” David goes
into HIS schtick and assumes Quentin Collins would not be mad at him or angry
at one of his own relatives.
There is still a thunder
storm. David has two moles on his neck that do look like a vampire bite.
They’re not.
He also seems jealous Amy
talked to Quentin and puts forth that she was just playing a game.
David says, “I know what we
can do.” Amy asks, “What?” during a very
long pause. It seems as if David forgot his lines or more likely he’s waiting
for Amy to respond with her “What?” before moving on. Maybe SHE forgot her line
or cue. For he’s fine after she asks, “What?”
He answers anyway: a séance.
“I’ve done these things lots of times,” he tells Amy as they set up a séance.
He calls Quentin Collins and the door busts open.
A figure is in the doorway,
dark and shadowy. It turns out to be…Vicky. Vicky meets Amy, “I’m Victoria
Clark.” NO! You’re Victoria
Bradford!
She sails David off to bed
and wants him to make sure he does NO reading this time. As she puts Amy to bed, she says, “This house
does seem scary on stormy nights, even to me.”
She sees the phone. Amy
mentions Tom used to tell her stories (about kings and queens and princesses)
and this makes Vicki think of Tom and she tells Amy, who asks, that she knew
Tom. Amy asks about Chris. Amy makes Vicki promise she’ll try to find out about
Chris, that he hasn’t gone away, and that she can find out where he is and can
see him.
Vicki says she will try and
Amy seems to overlook the “try” part. Amy feels she has to worry about Chris
because he is the only family she has. Vicki tells her she is sure he hasn’t
left (is she?) and she hugs Amy. It’s a nice little scene where, while wide
eyed and seemingly not blinking, Amy seems a bit more like a normal little girl
and Vicki is her old warm self again.
Chris is on the floor in his
room, no shoes on with mud on his feet. He is unconscious or asleep.
Later Carolyn lets Chris into
Collinwood (and outside the door, we see a HUGE stone divider wall, possibly
with vines and leaves on it or in front of it as there is also a thin tree on
the left of outside the door), telling him, “It’s been a long time.” She knows him.
“Yes, yes, it has.”
“You haven’t changed.”
He says, “Haven’t I?”
Vicky meets Chris. Carolyn
pauses before introducing her as Victoria Clarke. She’s not! She’s Bradford!
They talk briefly about Amy who has been talking about him all morning. Vicki
takes Chris to her.
Mike Shadow. Mike shadow over
Carolyn in her outrageous orange, red, purple dress. She checks herself in the
mirror as if she wants to look nice for Chris.
At the window, David tries to
console Amy and flubs, almost saying, “I don’t like to feel my relatives. I’d
like to see my relatives.”
Then he says of course he’d
rather be left alone.
He flubs again (maybe his
flubs are meant to cheer her up?) with “you’d be…you’d like…”
What he says is this: “Don’t
feel too bad, Amy. I don’t like to feel my…I don’t like to see my relative (or
relatives). That’s cause I like to be left alone. I guess if you were a boy,
you’d like to be left alone, too.”
Vicki brings Chris in. Amy
runs to him and he picks her up and whirls her around and innocently we see her
underwear. Vicki tells David it’s time to study his spelling and she takes
David to the sitting room next door.
Chris vs Amy. She wants to
come live with him and hopes he will move to Collinsport. He offers her
excuses. What would she do after he had to go to work? She tells him she can
take care of herself. He tells her she could not. WHAT about school? He tells
her it just isn’t possible. He will try to find her a nice home in town where
she can stay.
Amy asks if he is going to
take her to this home this afternoon and his answer is, “IDK, honey, that
depends.”
She wants to stay with him
just tonight which panics him and he says no and tries to explain.
Earlier he felt that some day
he will try to explain it all to her.
Amy concludes he does not
want her at all and turns away from him, shrugging him off twice. He says he is
sorry.
TWO NOTES: something is
flickering outside Amy’s room’s window (is it a reflection of the fireplace IN
her room OR a part of another room…another set?).
AND: I have to admit both Don
and Denise are excellent in this scene and really make you feel for them. I
almost cried. They are that good. And I’ve never been either’s biggest fan in
the past. BUT they are good for this show. And good in general, usually.
After Chris disappoints her
and walks out, sad, she hugs the phone creepily, vowing that she will not let
him take her to that home.
Carolyn tells Chris to let
Amy stay here, Vicki nods her agreement, and Carolyn goes on to say that her mother
already said it this morning, “We have all these rooms.”
Vicki says, “You’d be doing
us a favor, Mr. Jennings.”
She takes Chris upstairs to
her mother for Liz to convince him if they can’t. The music starts as they go
up and then STOPS cold.
David tries to cheer up a non
talking Amy. As he does, the flickering in the window is on the right side this
time instead of the left. He brings up having another séance and that this time
they will get Quentin.
A blond waitress at the Blue
Whale. Chris and Carolyn come in. Amy can stay at Collinwood for as long as she
wants to. Carolyn tells Chris they are not strangers.
Chris says if anyone asked
him about the Collinses of Collinwood, he would have said they were strangers
to me. But not anymore. Carolyn wonders if he will marry. She orders a
dacharie. He orders a shot of Irish when asked by the waitress, Chris saying,
“Oh, IDK, a shot of Irish.”
He wonders that everyone
thinks it strange he not take care of Amy like Tom did. Carolyn reminds him
that Tom didn’t travel as much as Chris does.
“Chris, we don’t spend much
of our time living other people’s lives.”
Carolyn asks he will ever
settle down. He says, “no.” She jokes,
“Psychologically incapable?”
Carolyn says, “You may change.”
She brings up if he will
consider what mother asked: that he stay around town for a week or so. It would
help Amy until she could feel secure with them.
She asks if he will stay or
how long. Chris, “I don’t know.”
The clock bell (a clock
tower?) tolls five times. 5pm.
Carolyn goes on about how
she’s a summer person, anyone who lives in
Chris is more concerned with
the time and how he forgot the time.
He sees a pentagram on the
waitress’s face. This means she is his next victim.
Chris hurries out, saying
goodbye. The woman checks her face in a mirror. We see the time: it is 1
o’clock and that IS a flub as the bells tolled five and it just got dark and at
1am it should have been dark for a very long time and the Blue Whale closes up
in the next scene, Carolyn has been long gone and it is then 1am as seen on
Chris’ clock in his room. It can’t be 1am (or PM for that matter) when Chris
and then later Carolyn leaves and then be 1am much later on!?
In other words: (now that is
a flub as it is meant to get dark early here and it cannot be dark at 1pm and
at 1am it has been dark for a very long time AND when the Blue Whale closes up
in the next scene, it is then 1am and Carolyn is long gone).
Chris returns to his room and
locks himself in. We hear voices of the crew. Chris chains his ankle to a
radiator. He turns into the wolf man in full view of the audience. It’s pretty
effective.
It is
The waitress shuts the juke
box. Someone tries to get in the door, jiggling the knob.
At the window is the wolf man
stalking. It jumps through the window and she screams. The animal comes right
up to her…and the camera. It is a very effective sequence.
Review: Much, much better.
Briscoe is good here. There is no Jeff. Amy is toned down a bit. David is
effective, Carolyn is effective and likeable. Vicki is given less to do.
The wolfman, while not as
effective as either Henry Hull in THE WEREWOLF OF LONDON or Lon Chaney in THE
WOLF MAN, FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN, HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, HOUSE OF
DRACULA (where he’s cured!), and ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (where
he’s killed?) it is pretty good for TV and soap at that.
Werewolves in TV tend to look TOO neat. This
happens in THE BOY WHO CRIED WEREWOLF (the 70s movie not the recent cute and
cuddly and fun Nick Movie 2010) and VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA-WEREWOLF
and BRAND OF THE BEAST (But not the more effective Hyde like wolf thing in MAN
BEAST) and LOST IN SPACE-THE SPACE CROPPERS.
Here, the wolf man is effective and the shot
of it outside the Blue Whale window just before it crashes in is very
atmospheric. It is also disturbing as it comes up to the camera. Quite chilling
in a way. Of course he had to kill the waitress…just as we like her since she
shut off that music we’ve heard ten thousand times in 1966 and 67.
Both the transformation and
the crash through the window are ambitious and well done. For a soap this is as
good as it gets.
The credits have Amy’s
bedroom and in the window is that flickering again. What is that? It looks like
it is IN an outdoors scene outside the window with trees?
NOTE: While it is easy to
feel sorry for Chris, due to Briscoe’s sympathetic/pathetic take on the
werewolf sufferer, it’s also hard to imagine that…Chris wouldn’t just turn
himself in. I mean his efforts to chain himself up have failed miserably twice
that we know of…and we might find out it’s been more times…and that cost at
least two people their lives already that we know of.
So it’s hard to feel that
sorry for him as he’s being incredibly selfish AND playing with people’s lives
including Liz and later Carolyn, though the wolf man seems to stay away from
Amy or want to harm her but we also know that others will be in danger from it
including Sabrina (and if Sam Hall’s article is to be believed eventually Chris
and Sabrina both die, her from the wolfman; though I bring them both back in
WHAT IF DARK SHADOWS WERE NEVER CANCELLED, her for a long, long time).
It seems to me that he gets a
lot of people killed or put in danger by not turning himself in or even killing
himself. This makes him rather unsympathetic.
And I don’t care what anyone
says or what was thought at the time, Betsy is perfectly fine as Vicki. Like
she never left. That’s my thought and I’m sticking to it,
Our thoughts
John: How did David become the seance master all of a sudden? I don't recall him ever snooping while one was being conducted. I'm actually surprised Vicki didn't ask them about the door swinging open on its own before she came in...
Christine: Just the wind. You know how drafty those halls are at Collinwood during a storm. David became an expert on seances ever since he participated in one over a year and a half ago in Episode 186, and we should assume he's always snooping around the occult meetings at the mansion, even if we don't see him. So, Vicki is back to her job as governess, now that her husband has returned to his own time period, and Carolyn has found a new love interest.
John: Is anyone else having a problem with Vicki being referred to as 'Vicki Clark'? That just sounds wrong.
Christine: They had such a quickie wedding I don't think she's had time to go through the process of officially changing her name, therefore, she'll still be labeled as Victoria Winters in the character links for clarity. Also, I think she's technically Victoria Bradford. So confusing.
John: Welcome to the Pentagram-cam! How fortuitous that a werewolf comes to town just in time to meet our first(?) waitress at The Blue Whale. Good thing Bob the Bartender had the night off. The only down side is that Dan didn't spring for a multi-step werewolf transformation a la Lon Chaney, Jr. Instead, we go right from Chris Jennings to full-wolf. Now can someone explain why Chris would chain himself in, if Chris-wolf would just undo the chain?
Christine: Actually, Don Briscoe transformed to another actor entirely during the change from human to werewolf. Alex Stevens will be bringing his lycanthropic talents to the show for quite some time. I thought his stunt dive through the window of The Blue Whale was pretty impressive, though difficult to capture.
Everything Dan says is worth repeating here:
Episode 640: Bad Wolf
“There’s a way that you can call people from the dead. I’ve seen them do it downstairs a lot.”
Christopher Jennings, handsome and mysterious bad boy with a heart of gold and a secret sorrow, comes over to Collinwood to collect his little sister, who he’s struggling to care for. Their parents are gone, and the more reliable twin brother has recently died, and now it’s just Chris and Amy, trying to make their way in the world.
Also, Chris just murdered a guy last week for walking into his hotel room at the wrong moment. I guess everybody has a different way of coping with stress.
Now, we never found out what Chris did with his victim’s mutilated carcass. It must have been quite a clean-up job, because the kill was a spectacularly messy event, and it happened in the hotel room that Chris had just checked into. The whole room was torn up, and the body was savaged, so you’d imagine the trail of blood and bone and skull fragments would have been pretty easy for anybody to follow right to the scene of the crime.
But this is Collinsport, where the police force is still trying to figure out who killed all those cows two years ago. You can basically just drag your blood-soaked corpses out to the curb on recycling day, and then clean the carpets at your leisure.
So when Chris shows up at Collinwood to pick up Amy, he’s just the same charming guy that he was back when he was felony-free, and it looks like the daughter of the house has noticed.
Carolyn says, “It’s been a long time!” and smiles, and then she says, “You haven’t changed,” and smiles. So there you are. Carolyn is open for business.
This is a mild retcon, I believe — I don’t think there was any hint before that the Collins family and the Jennings family had ever met. Liz found Amy in the woods yesterday, and it didn’t seem like she recognized her, and several months ago, Julia was moaning about Tom Jennings, and I don’t think anybody knew who she was talking about.
But I’m not going to go back and check, because who cares. Chris and Carolyn like each other. On with the show.
The funny thing is that they’re treating him like a sweet guy with an unfortunate hang-up, rather than a radioactive serial killer, which is what he is.
Neither the soap opera or the monster movie genre are particularly subtle with the characterization, because in both cases, you’ve got to keep the audience pretty well informed about what’s going on, or their minds tend to wander. So if the villains even bother to hide their dark intentions at all, they do it behind an easily permeable sneer, and as soon as everyone’s back is turned, they say mwa-ha-haaaa, and start poisoning everyone’s sherry.
But Chris is awkward, and bashful, and polite, and everybody seems to like him. That means a lot for a new character — making a friend means that you have value in the narrative, and that goes double if they can establish that you’re already friends with a core character, like Carolyn. There’s no ambiguity here. The audience is under strict instructions to like Christopher Jennings.
So I guess we’re just straight-up rooting for the psychopaths these days. This approach is new for the show; we’ve never seen anything quite like it.
Barnabas has become the central character, but I don’t think there’s ever been a moment where we’re supposed to think that he’s a great guy. He’s almost always plotting to commit some horrible crime, to cover up for his previous horrible crimes.
Similarly, Adam started out as an innocent, clumsy child, and became a romantic grad student under Carolyn and Professor Stokes’ care, but once he fell under Nicholas’ satanic influence, he turned into a monster, and couldn’t come back.
What we’ve got here is a character being served to us unambiguously as a potential new romantic lead, and a mass murderer, at the same time.
In fact, by mid-episode we’ve even got Chris and Carolyn on a date, where they’re both just stammering and blushing away like a couple of kids, and it’s almost like his next victim isn’t right here in the room.
But then the church bell rings five, and Chris realizes that it’s getting dark, which is terribly irresponsible.
I mean, his whole shtick is that he’s always brooding over the curse which haunts him every moment, and he’s even had a couple of noticeable twinges of guilt during this conversation, but this is now the second time that we’ve seen him caught off guard by the lunar cycle.
It’s not like the moon can sneak up on you all of a sudden. I think somebody needs to invest in an almanac and a bookmark.
Although, to be fair, the full moon shows up a lot more often in Collinsport than anywhere else in the world. Chris killed the hotel clerk last week, and he was prowling in the woods last night, and today there’s another bad moon on the rise.
Now, as we’ve discussed before, time never works the way you think it should in serialized narrative. The events of a single night can go on for five episodes, but as far as the audience is concerned, whenever you turn on the TV, the episode takes place today.
So if you want to be nitpicky and poke fun at Collinsport’s lunar peculiarities, there are two ways to go. You could use the air dates to measure the time between full moons, or you could watch carefully and count all of the days and evenings that pass by in story time. Both methods will give you the same result, which is that nobody cares.
After all, if you’re fortunate enough to be making a television show that includes werewolf attacks, then the last thing that you want to do is wait a month between werewolf attacks. You want as many werewolf attacks as you can squeeze into your werewolf show, because werewolf attacks are awesome.
Still, Chris ought to have a better plan than this. He’s had either a month or a week or twenty-two minutes since the last time this happened, and he has not used that time constructively. He just runs back to his hotel room, locks the door, chains his ankle to the radiator, and hopes for the best.
I mean, you have to ask how often he’s had to do this, and if it has ever, ever worked. We just saw him do the “lock the door” trick last week. It was not a success.
But, oh, will you get a load of this. Dark Shadows makeup artist Vinnie Loscalzo worked on a lot of cool stuff during his time on the show — vampire bites, Frankenstein scars, zombie heads and Quentin’s muttonchops — but the werewolf is his greatest achievement. Just look at it, it’s gorgeous.
And they’ve got this awesome new snarling dog sound effect for the werewolf that is probably the single scariest thing they’ve had on the show. It is not possible to hear that growling and not get at least a little bit nervous; it operates on a primitive level that gets under your skin.
So this is the point — the makeup, the sound effects, the stunt man with yak hair glued to his face crashing through the window at the Blue Whale after last call. It’s phenomenal. People make fun of how cheap Dark Shadows is, with its wobbly sets and no retakes, and the show really was running on a ridiculously low budget.
But with that reputation, you’d expect that the werewolf costume would look silly, and he’d just run into the room snarling, rather than jumping head first through the window. Instead, it looks amazing. They spent the money and time where it really counts, which is the spectacle.
So they close the week with one of the most effective action sequences they’ve ever done. For my money, it’s Barnabas getting bitten by the marionette bat, and the werewolf jumping through the window at the Blue Whale. Everything else is a distant third.
The barmaid squeals, and the wolf man looks us straight in the eye, and all is forgiven. All the sins and trespasses of the last several months — the missteps, and the crimes against narrative — they are forgiven, now and forever.
It’s a good day to be alive. Not for the barmaid, obviously, but in general.
Monday: Left Behind.
Episode 640: Bad Wolf | Dark Shadows Every Day
Dark Shadows bloopers to watch out for:
David sits down in front of the fireplace, and says, “I know what we can do!” It takes Amy a couple beats before she remembers that she’s supposed to say, “What?”
As David and Amy set up the seance, you can see the reflection of a yellow studio light in the window behind David.
I don’t usually mention the boom mic shadows, because they’re so common, but there really is an epic example when Carolyn introduces Chris to Vicki in the foyer. You can practically read the serial number off it.
David tells Amy, “Don’t feel too bad, Amy. I don’t like to feel my — I don’t like to see my relatives.”
When Chris enters the room and Amy runs into his arms, he picks her up and swings her around. Her skirt rides up, and you can see her underwear.
Chris gets off track:
Amy: Where have you been?
Chris: Now, wait just a minute. The question is not where have I been.
Amy: It is!
Chris: That’s not it. That’s not the question. (He looks at the teleprompter.) You were supposed to stay in that hospital!
When Carolyn and Chris walk upstairs, a music cue starts and then suddenly stops. We cut to the next scene, and the music starts up again.
The jukebox music suddenly cuts off in the middle of Carolyn and Chris’ scene in the Blue Whale.
As Chris manacles himself to the radiator, somebody in the studio says, “Hey, just a minute!”
The scene with Chris turning into the werewolf was filmed earlier and then edited in. This creates some odd jumps in the music at the beginning and end of the sequence.
Behind the Scenes:
The pentagram appearing on the barmaid’s face is a reference to Universal’s 1941 film The Wolf Man. In the film, the mark of the pentagram can be seen on the hand of the werewolf’s next victim.
This may also have been referenced in episode 632 last week, when Chris killed the hotel clerk. Check out the screenshot above — when they’re seen from the right angle, the shadows on the wall suggest a pentagram.
The werewolf is stunt man Alex Stevens, who appears in 25 episodes over the next year and a half. It’s early in his screen career. Until now, he’s only been in two movies — Lady in Cement starring Frank Sinatra, and the Kirk Douglas movie A Lovely Way to Die. In 1969, he’ll do some memorable stunt work for the first season of Sesame Street, playing the baker who sings, “Six chocolate cakes!” and then falls down the stairs.
He’s credited as “Stunt Coordinator,” although the credit appears in the middle of the cast list.
People are always pointing out that it’s funny that the werewolf “shrinks” — Don Briscoe and David Selby are both over six feet tall, and Stevens is five foot eight. Why people think that turning into an animal should make you taller, I don’t know.
The barmaid is played by Carol Ann Lewis, in her only Dark Shadows appearance. Lewis appeared in a couple episodes of Route 66, and in a 1969 movie called All Women Are Bad. She appeared in a small role in Spofford on Broadway in early 1968, and that’s all my intel on her.
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