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I've seen Dark Shadows four times in the last two weeks, and still enjoy it as much each time even though I know what's going to happen in each scene.  I loved Johnny's Barnabas Collins.  He's a tortured soul like so many of Johnny's other characters, but Johnny always has a way to make the audience fall in love with his characters no matter what.  I loved the elegance that Johnny put into Barnabas not only in his manner of speaking, but also the way he moved and walked and his gentlemanly manners around the ladies in the family and with Victoria.  Yet he could turn on a dime and display a totally different Barnabas when he was arguing or fighting with Angelique, or during their wild love scene. 

I think Johnny and Michelle Pfeiffer were well-matched on screen as far as their years of experience and their talents.  The scenes between the two of them makes me wish that they could find another project to do together sometime in a totally different context.  I could sense the amount of respect that each of them had for the other when it was just the two of them in scenes together. Two veteran actors at the top of their game coming together on screen for the first time. 

I loved all of the wardrobe!  Another fantastic job by Colleen Atwood and her department!  The music brought back lots of memories for me, as did a lot of the props from the 1970s that were in the Collins house.  I collected those troll dolls when I was a kid, and I had the Operation board game and a lava lamp!

There were times that I thought Johnny's facial make-up had been applied a little too heavy-handed.  During close-ups, you could see cracks in the make-up, and I thought the swaths of brown blusher on his cheeks was a bit too much.  It was supposed to make the hollows in his cheekbones stand out, but I ended up being distracted by the heavy amount of blusher instead.

The one thing that I still don't understand is why the family members, town residents and the hippies never questioned Barnabas' appearance prior to finding out that he was a vampire.  His eyes were blacked out, his lips were red, his face and skin were white, yet no one seemed to notice that he looked any different than anyone else.  No one questioned it.

I thought Helena was really funny playing the drunken psychiatrist!  Another movie where Johnny kills off Helena's character!

The one person who I thought was fantastic in his role, and who isn't getting any accolades or attention in the media, is Jackie Earle Haley who played Willie Lomax.  He had a lot of the funny lines, his facial expressions were priceless, and I thought he was a really interesting character. 

There were two areas in the story that I thought would have been really funny if the scenes had been written a little differently.  When Willie and Barnabas first walk up to the outside of the bar where Barnabas was going in to try to get contracts with the fishing captains, my first thought was that Willie (the drunkard) was bringing Barnabas to his favorite watering hole, and the two of them would get drunk together.  It would have been really funny to see a drunk Barnabas!  And a hungover Barnabas the next morning!  The second opportunity was when Barnabas was sitting at the campfire with the hippies and they were smoking marijuana and passed the joint to him.  It would have been really funny to see Barnabas take a hit from the joint or get high before he ended up biting the necks and sucking the blood out of the whole group.  I was actually disappointed when Barnabas passed the joint on to the girl sitting next to him without taking a hit off it. 

I was disappointed that the four original TV show actors didn't get more screen time at the disco party.  Other than a few seconds when they walked in the door and were greeted by Barnabas, the only other time I saw three of them (without Jonathan Frid) was as background actors chatting with each other at the party as they stood behind Michelle Pfeiffer.  I was hoping there would be some sort of scene between Johnny and Jonathan, even if there wasn't dialogue involved, where they might have stood and looked at each other more intently (or smiled knowingly at each other) when Jonathan arrived at the party...it could have designated a passing of the torch from one actor to the other for the role of Barnabas Collins. 

I'm eager to see what sort of featurettes and behind-the-scenes stuff they're going to put on the DVD!  I hope there are bloopers on there!