Dark Shadows Delight #14: Nathan Forbes Practically Demands Fellatio From Barnabas

So now the almost entirely gay male cast has been granted new characters (save for Jonathan Frid, who gets his first shot at the pre-vampire Barnabas) and transported back to 1795, where men were men and wore trousers nearly tight enough for determining circumcision status.

In the scene where Barnabas confirms that he will be marrying Angelique, Lt. Forbes seems distressed, enough so to march over, outrageously splay his legs, and all but thrust his dick into Barnabas’s trembling mouth.

Frid plays the broken man here, still in his mourning attire but wearing gratuitously applied make-up, while Joel Crothers appears quite comfortable preening in Lt. Nathan Forbes’ anachronistic naval uniform, which looks as though a grandmother’s complete spoon collection has been affixed to the lapels. Now armed with a phallic saber and pre-1970s seventies sideburns, the actor reaches dizzying degrees of

Dark Shadows Delight #12: “Then what is the point?”

Jonathan Frid was renowned for flubbing lines and paraphrasing Dark Shadows dialogue, much to the frustration of its writers, but most of the time he carries it off fairly well. In this instance, however, he seems to have painted himself into a corner with some unfortunate improvisation as Barnabas threatens to kill Dr. Julia Hoffman for the thousandth time. Grayson Hall attempts

Mandatory Retirement for Tim Burton after Dreadful Dark Shadows

Tim Burton, please wave goodbye and promise to never come back.

Tim Burton has now successfully taken three of my cherished childhood œuvres d’art: Planet of the Apes, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and now Dark Shadows, and pissed his signature all over them.  Dark Shadows is especially painful because I’ve recently re-discovered it as an adult and love it all the more.

I suppose the overlap in our mutual fondness for specific works demonstrates that we must share some of the same tastes, but only in nostalgia, not in re-creation.  In fact,  I would say for Tim Burton it’s less re-creation and more defecation.  He’s got the money and the star power to run wild, which result in self-indulgent travesties that showcase The Tim Burton Experience™ but leave

A few months ago I noticed that Netflix was streaming the original Dark Shadows ABC daytime soap opera, no doubt coordinated with the release of the film adaptation set for May 2012. After a moment’s hesitation, I knew that I had to go back – return to my five-year-old self and confront one of my deepest fears: Barnabas Collins, the agent of many childhood nightmares that left an imprint of anxiety on my psyche that may have never been fully erased.   I was about to conduct