Podcast: House of Dark Shadows
The bewildering effect of condensing 200 episodes of Dark Shadows into a 90 minute movie
Bring Me The Axe! Horror Podcast
Episode 90: House of Dark Shadows
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Bring Me the Axe! is a comedy podcast celebrating the best (and worst) horror from a time when the video store ruled the night. Every other week, brothers Bryan and Dave White (and the occasional guest) heed the call of nostalgia and evaluate the classic 70s and 80s horror movies they loved in their childhood to determine whether the movies are still relevant today or should be allowed to fade into obscurity.
This week we watch a movie that takes several hundred episodes of the seminal gothic soap opera and condenses them to 90 brisk minutes of vampire melodrama in a way that is confusing and frustrating in ways that few movies are.
Dark Shadows, for all its cheesiness and cheapness is one of the most important contributions to horror in the way that it added a dimension to vampire media that hadn’t really been explored yet. Without Barnabas Collins you do not get Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. No Buffy The Vampire Slayer. No Vampire The Masquerade. In this episode we run it down in depth. Dave is a huge fan of the TV show and can’t wait to tell you all about it and fill in the blanks where the movie fails because believe me, listeners, this movie fails big time.
The wealthy Collins family receives a visit from long-lost cousin Barnabas but he conceals a terrible truth. He is a 200 year old vampire, freed from his prison of a hidden locked coffin by the Collins family handyman. He stalks the people of Collinsport by night and falls madly in love with the Collins family governess, Maggie, when she bears a striking resemblance the woman he once loved. It’s basically Dracula but with a lot of really weird zigs and zags as it does its best encapsulate over one hundred hours of soap opera storytelling into a short feature film.We close out our Halloween Hootenanny series of all Bring Me The Axe episodes all October with an episode dedicated to a listener who really made our year. This year’s series caps off with a look at the gloriously frantic, unfocused shit show that is Dario Argento’s Phenomena. Falling very early in the acting career of American movie star, Jennifer Connelly, it’s kind of amazing that she finished this production and continued to act given that her finger was literally separated from her body thanks to an angry monkey that also actually slashed up the face of Argento’s soon-to-be ex-wife, Daria Nicolodi. You have Donald Pleasance putting on a clinic for phoning it in and yet the entire movie manages to be charming and extremely enjoyable, one of Argento’s most Freudian movies, for good or for bad.
When Jennifer, the daughter of an American movie star is shipped off to a Swiss school for girls she lands there at the worst possible time as a murderer is on the loose killing young women. Lucky for her, she has the incredible power to speak to and command insects and she uses this marvelous ability to crack the case since the cops are doing fuck-all to solve it, themselves. Along the way she teams up with a wheelchair-bound entomologist and his helper monkey to get to the bottom of things.
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