| DVD Roundup April 2003
 Vampires on DVD Never Die, Unless You Can Slay Them
Vampires appeal to us all. These
creatures of the night are the monsters of choice for providing chills for popular
culture. Vampires turn up in video games (from the classic Castlevania to newcomer Blood
Rayne), in comics (Blade is a vampire, and both Batman and the X-Men have fought
Dracula) and, of course, in both movies and TV. More than 3.5 million Internet pages are
devoted to vampires. As the tagline for The Lost Boys says, "Sleep all day.
Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire."
Bram Stoker shaped our modern idea of the vampire: an
immortal, fanged creature of the night that subsists solely on blood and can be destroyed
by a stake through the heart. The traits of vampires vary greatly by culture: some live
eternally, some for little more than a month; sunlight will destroy some vampires, while
others can move about freely during the day; some, like the Bulgarian Ubour, don't even
drink blood. Most legends don't mention fangs at all, and the stakes are just to pin them
to the earth so they can't get up and walk around, not kill them. For an Irishman writing
about German legends, Stoker has had a surprisingly potent influence.
Not even the Chosen One is immune. Buffy Summers is the
Slayer, the one girl in all the world with the strength and skill to hunt the vampires,
and to stop the spread of evil. And the vampires she hunts? Total vamped-out fangfaces:
sunlight-avoidin', human-blood-drinkin', immortal-life-leadin' friends of Bram.
I may be prejudiced, since it was the first season of the
show that I saw, but I think the recently-released-on-DVD season 3 [***] is Buffy's best.
Major changes in character and tone, dynamic action, and the payoff of two seasons' worth
of foreshadowing all came together to make the show one of the best things on TV the year
it first aired.
In season 3, Buffy is forced to confront the darker side of
her role as Slayer, first in the form of Faith, the reckless Slayer who sees no problem
with using her powers for personal gain, and later in an underhanded test concocted by the
Watcher's Council, the ancient group charged with guiding and educating each new Chosen
One. On top of that, it's her senior year at Sunnydale High, which means that Buffy and
her friends are slowly turning into adults.
As for the DVD set, gone are the superfluously ornate (and
slow to load) menu animations, replaced with a simple scroll and video clip. The packaging
is divided between the forces of light and darkness, with pictures of "good"
characters Willow, Xander, and Buffy opposed by images of the darker Angel, Faith, and
Spike.
Disc 1 picks up a few months after the end of the second
season, which closed with Buffy leaving her vampire-slaying duties, and her hometown,
Sunnydale. Her friends have tried to carry on in her stead. In other episodes, a
homecoming party goes awry, Buffy meets her opposite number, and the full moon brings bad
tidings. As a disc extra, you can read the original script for "Faith, Hope &
Trick."
"Homecoming," featuring "Slayerfest
'98" (a celebration cooked up by the dark forces), kicks off disc 2, followed by an
episode concerned with that high school ritual of selling candy bars to raise money. A
powerful artifact is unearthed, and season 2's big bad menace, the vampire Spike, makes a
grand return. "Band Candy" and "Lover's Walk" include scripts.
In a nod to It's a Wonderful Life, the opening
episode on disc 3 takes a look at a world without Buffy, while the ghosts of Christmas
past claw their way back to the surface and children fall victim to the occult in the
second segment, "Amends." There are only three episodes on this disc so that the
end of the season can be more evenly distributed (if four episodes were on each disc, the
standard 22-episode season would leave only two episodes for disc 6). The rest of the
space is used for special features which include "The Wish" script and the
wonderfully deconstructive "Season 3 Overview." There is also a look at the
show's unique "Buffy Speak," and an interesting art gallery.
On disc 4 Buffy is powerless, Xander is useless, Faith is
reckless, and the Council is tactless. I have no idea why all the bonus commentaries got
loaded onto this disc, but they do compliment some fine episodes. "Helpless" has
a fairly straightforward commentary by writer David Fury, "Bad Girls" has writer
Doug Petrie's commentary and an interview with Joss Whedon about the fun of Faith and the
pretense of Wesley, and "Consequences" has a (somewhat self-centered) commentary
from director Michael Gershman.
Disc 5 returns one of the most powerful demons from earlier
in the season, exposes truths, grants Buffy a new power, and sets the stage for the
season's grand finale. (The "Earshot" episode was originally pulled from the
schedule due to the network's reactionary paranoia -- dealing with a potential school
shooting; it was due to air only a few weeks after the events at Columbine High School.)
There's another Whedon interview attached to "Enemies" and a Jane Espensen
commentary on "Earshot."
You can tell the end of a school year is near when the
senior prom rolls around, and since the town is built on a Hellmouth, you know any prom at
Sunnydale High is going to turn out badly. After that, the season-long talk of graduation
day comes to a head with "Graduation Day," parts 1 and 2, which also include the
last interview with Joss. Despite all the distractions that are thrown her way, Buffy
knows she has no chance to win the final battle on her own.
The conclusion is stunning, mixing humor, horror, fighting,
romance, and big changes in the show's own inimitable style. This disc also left room for
special features in the form of wardrobe, weapons, and special effects.
The six-disc set includes a booklet with writing/directing
credits, original airdates, and a brief synopsis of each episode. Season one's packaging
was mostly blue, and season two red, and now we are offered a sort of yellowish green.
The episodes are a mixed bag in terms of appearance. Buffy
is, by nature, a dark show, not just in themes, but also in terms of lighting; at least
half the scenes take place at night. Unfortunately, the image quality isn't really good
enough to convey this. While there are a few good transfers, we mostly get over-saturated
or low-contrast pictures. While you can obviously fix this by changing your television's
settings, you shouldn't have to resort to such adjustments. Fortunately, Buffy got a
larger budget in season 3, and its producers could afford better film stock, so we don't
see a lot of grain. Overall, the set looks better than video, but is by no means archival
quality.
Though Buffy may be one of the most original characters on
television, her world was by no means wholly created by Joss Whedon and company. In fact,
the Chosen One owes much to her cinematic and television predecessors (at least in setting
and events, if not in character).
In the 1979 theatrical film, Thirst, just released
on DVD by the enterprising independent Elite Entertainment [**], young businesswoman Kate
Davis is abducted by a strange cult whose members profess to be the pinnacle of humanity.
Initially shocked by their seemingly detached, bloodthirsty ways, she slowly finds herself
coming around to their point of view, but something deep inside keeps telling her to run
away. Which voice will she ultimately listen to, and what will the consequences of her
decision be?
While the film is decent, it's a bit too esoteric to earn
cult status. I'm not sure what the missing ingredient is that would have earned Thirst a
loyal following; perhaps if the blood-taking group was less ambiguous, or more questions
had been answered, or maybe even if the script had gone further in the other direction,
obfuscating things even more.
In any case, the sort of "modern vampires"
portrayed in Buffy by undead technocrat Mr. Trick, and the mechanization of the
blood-harvesting plant in "The Wish," could have their roots in this unknown
Aussie film. In particular, the whole concept of the "dairy," where humans are
stabled to provide high-volume, high quality, pasteurized bloodletting is reminiscent of Thirst.
Of course, such mechanization is the norm for Thirst and is an oddity in the more
supernatural setting of Sunnydale.
For all the tragic romance that they went through in the
first two seasons, Buffy and her "good vampire" lover Angel aren't even the
first mixed-life couple on TV. In the 1960s (and again in the early '90s), Barnabas
Collins was prowling the small fishing village of Collinsport, Maine.
While Dark Shadows borrowed liberally from all sorts
of monster mythologies, the main star was its resident vampire, Barnabas. The daily
half-hour soap opera started its life in a fairly mundane (if mysterious) manner before
delving into the supernatural around episode 70. Almost a year into the show's run,
Barnabas came to call. A vampire uncomfortable with his lot as undead, Barnabas eventually
fell in love with the woman who was supposed to destroy him and his kind. Sound familiar?
Dark Shadows
ran for 1225 episodes, and bridged the gap between black-and-white and color television
production. The show has recently premiered on MPI DVD in four, four-disc, forty-episode
sets. (Collection 5 comes out at the end of April, and 6 is due to be released on June
24.) With bonus features such as cast interviews and episodes not seen since their
original runs, they're definitely worth a look, if just to see Buffy's roots showing.
It's been confirmed recently that the seventh season of
Buffy, currently airing, will be the show's last. There's been talk of trying to find a
way to spin the show off sans Sarah Michelle Gellar. Personally, I hope that Joss
just lets this one die; better to send the show off well than to try to keep it lurching
along. As it is, Buffy is surely not the first television offering to feature vampires,
nor will it be the last, but it is the best.
...Josh Barber
joshb@hometheatersound.com |
