House of Dark Shadows

Basically an alternate-reality type of thing. Events stay the same for a bit then diverge as the body count starts to rise. People who survived the series don't necessarily survive this movie. Maggie Evans is the governess in this version.

As I did with the Tim Burton version of Dark Shadows, I'll just watch the movie, capture a few scans, and then note my opinion of it overall. I will say right off I don't care a lot for movies that seem to be made just to kill off regular characters since this, to me, indicates either the person making the movie just wants to make money and/or they actually hate the series and what happened in it, even if it's a person who created the series in the first place.

One thing I really disliked was that the opening credits stretched some 9 minutes in to the start of the movie. They would be all right at the end of the movie, but not at the beginning as that is when you want people to start really getting into the movie, not being distracted by the names and descriptions that keep going on.

Carolyn dies first. A guy named Elliott believes Carolyn was killed by a vampire. Carolyn attacks a guy she likes and this confirms she's a vampire. They set up a trap for her and Dr. Hoffman finds out Barnabas is a vampire. Barnabas ends up killing Julia. He also attacks Maggie.

They play sort of fast-and-loose with vampire mythology here. The vampire is repulsed by a cross, yet a new vampire can be made almost instantly. (One problem here, too. Carolyn is repulsed by crosses and is trapped that way, yet when Barnabas enters the room to get Maggie, there's a huge cross on her bed and two on the window (maybe even more) but he's not affected at all.) The vampire expert is turned into a vampire and killed later, and so is Roger. (Why does the old house have a cannon in it?)

The idea in the movie seemed to be to kill off as many of the actors as possible. The bat at the very end was something that was to have been explained in a follow-up movie, but that particular one was not done.

It's not a bad movie, but the concept of killing off almost every single person I think is somewhat hard to understand what reasoning lay behind that.