My latest column for BitchBuzz on vampire shows to watch while waiting for the next installment of Twilight or True Blood, shows a little chutzpah considering my editor had tweeted earlier that same day that one of "the things we're all sick of" included vampires. Have I got timing or what? She still published it.If you find yourself chewing on wax lips while waiting for the next episode of True Blood or the second Twilight film, there are a couple of series that might just ease those sanguine jones for a time, though they've tended to fall out of toothy fashion.
If you like your vamps as do-gooders, check out Forever Knight, the saga of detective Nick Knight, an 800 year old vampire with a conscience who works the night shift as a cop, cleaning up the streets of, er, Toronto. Okay, glamourous it's not. But there's a low budget charm to the show, helped immensely by a game cast... [continue reading at BitchBuzz].
5 comments:
Yeesh, to skip over the Whedons (and ULTRAVIOLET and the DARK SHADOWS revival featuring Barbara Steele) to go right for KINDRED? It's Just Not Right. (And I believe FOREVER KNIGHT, which I enjoyed, had a twisted genesis that goes beyond the Rick Springfield pilot film and ties in with the vampire-judge series DARK JUSTICE, a fellow denizen--with the inital, pre-syndication run of FK--of CBS's Crimetime After Primetime that in addition birthed SILK STALKINGS and a remarkably pervy Stephen Cannell anthology series [certainly remarkably so for CBS broadcast, even in late night], SCENE OF THE CRIME [CBS dumped that one post-haste]...as distinct from Fox's lighthearted the-camera-is-a-character SCENE or the endless German series TATORT, which is currently imported by the small but doughty MHz WorldView network. The extraordinarily stupid NIGHT HEAT also had an extended run in that M-F strip, in those pre-Letterman days at CBS.
Well, going with things I could in some sense "recommend" meant leaving out all versions of Dark Shadows -- Steele or no -- because it was so boring. I tried, I tried to like it -- but it was so incredibly tedious I barely ever managed to sit through an entire episode.
Haven't seen Ultraviolet, so I can't comment.
"Crimetime After Primetime" -- LOL. Yeah, that's why the opening credits for FK made much of the strip club shot from the first episode, giving the impression that it was far more titillating than it ever was.
Unfortunately, I have the Rick Springfield made-for-tv-movie on DVD. Oh, the horror, the horror.
I can definitely go with you on the dullness of the original DARK SHADOWS, which I also tried to like more than I liked, but for whatever reason I dug the shortlived weekly primetime 1990s revival, and found KINDRED: THE EMBRACED utterly soporific. Wonder how they'd stand with me now. Though even KINDRED was better than the syndicated DRACULA: THE SERIES.
Everyone needs a DVD that can serve as a coaster or weapon in a pinch.
ULTRAVIOLET, a short BBC series which shouldn't be confused with the Mila J. film of a few years back, was a solid piece of work, some of which was pretty clearly echoed, more foolishly, by the UNDERWORLD films.
As a fan of Louis Jourdan DRACULA miniseries and SUBSPECIES II as well as THE HUNGER, the vamps never actually go away...
Hmmm -- I think I might have seen one episode of the revamped Dark Shadows but I can't recall. I'll have to check out Ultraviolet -- in my abundant free time. Hee.
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