A movie in 100 words or less: Dark Shadows

To be completely and totally honest with you—and really, isn’t that both what we want in this relationship?—Tuesday’s Big. Exciting. News! wasn’t really “new” news anymore by the time it posted on Tuesday.  Because, in fact, I’d gotten The Call, (yes, one of those calls all writers dream about as they toil the long, late hours in the obscurity of their writerly caves, grumbling and nit-picking their work like a curmudgeonly might make over his never-going-to-be-quite-perfect-lawn) a week ago today.

Trust me, no one had a harder time not saying anything for the whole weekend than I did.  But often times in publishing, there are things, breathtaking, pulse-quickening things, that simply Cannot Be Spoken Of Yet.  Henceforth, we’ll call them Temporarily Secret Things, and with luck there will be more on the horizon.

Anyway, the point is that Thursday, April 11th, was kind of a special night for me and the family.

But Thursday is a school night, and I had a hockey game, so it wasn’t quite the perfect time for a little in-home celebrating.

Friday, though, I had every intention of getting out the mirror ball, spinning up some records, and going full-blown wild.

As it turns out though, I, um, don’t actually own a mirror ball. Or any records.  Although, technically, I guess maybe that’s okay because it means I’m not a hipster? I think hipsters are okay but 40 year-old ones aren’t?  I don’t know; I can’t keep up anymore.  Regardless, I’m choosing to define “wild” as a kind of relative term.

As in, I’m not exactly “wild,” relative to anything.

What I did do on Friday night, though, was open my bottle of Dogfish Head 75-Minute IPA, which is something not often seen around these parts.  It’s not exactly “rare”, but it was special enough for me.  So after everyone was tucked all warm and snuggly for the night, I stretched out on the couch watch a movie, as is my way.  As it turns out, a red envelope containing the Burton/Depp remake of Dark Shadows, the gothic horror soap opera cult-hit from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s was at the house waiting for me.

Dark Shadows

Full confession: I loved Dark Shadows reruns* when I was kid. But I’d heard terrible things about the movie, and it wasn’t exactly a box office hit, so expectations were low. Once again, that proved to be a good thing. Sure, this isn’t the Best! Movie! Ever! But it was fun, campy, and didn’t take itself seriously. Given how soberly we’ve been accepting angsty, shiny vampires lately, Depp’s campy-yet-traditional version was quite a fresh breath. Sure, I’d have preferred they set it in 2012 rather than remaking the 1972 setting, but still, I enjoyed my brief return to Collinsport.

Admittedly, I was in a pretty damned good mood that night, so this comes with the standard disclaimers about subjectivity and your mileage varying, etc., etc., blah blah blah.  But I still say that if you’ve got a couple of hours and are looking for a little gothic campy horror in your life (and who isn’t, really?), you could do far worse.

Pud’n

*reruns: From the wayback times, before DVRs and streaming video, this refers to episodes of a show run again, or re-run, to fill programming time when first-run programming was not available.  Kids, ask your parents about summer reruns.