A totally miscast Matt Frewer played Doyle’s great detective in Hallmark’s Canadian version of The Sign of Four, the second in a series of ‘public domain’ adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories.
John Fawcett’s impressive Canadian cable TV movie Ginger Snaps linked lycanthropy and menstruation when the weird Brigitte (Emily Perkins) realized that her rebellious older sister (Katharine Isabelle) was turning into a sexy werewolf.
Wolf Girl was a USA Cable Entertainment movie for Halloween in which the eponymous hirsute heroine was trapped in a freak show run by an over-the-top Tim Curry.
The Cinemax/HBO series Creature Features comprised loose ‘remakes’ of five old AIP movies — She Creature, The Day the World Ended, How to Make a Monster, Earth vs. The Spider and Teenage Caveman — executive-produced by the late Samuel Z. Arkoff and with special effects credited to Stan Winston on all but the last title. Despite the presence of such stars as Rufus Sewell, Nastassja Kinski, Randy Quaid, Colleen Camp, Julie Strain, Dan Aykroyd and Theresa Russell, the results were definitely mixed.
Lost Voyage, starring Judd Nelson and Lance Henriksen, was a fun, low-budget horror thriller set on a cruise ship that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle and returned from Hell possessed by evil. Almost exactly the same story was told in Lewis Teague’s inferior The Triangle, a TBS movie starring Luke Perry and Dan Cortese amongst a group of vacationers killed off by evil spirits on a lost liner.
Judd Nelson also reprised his role as psychotic screenwriter Stanley Caldwell in the USA Cable Entertainment sequel Return to Cabin by the Lake.
Bo Derek was the professor with a killer curriculum in the Sci Fi original movie Horror 101, while Fox’s The Rats apparently had nothing to do with James Herbert as the verminous creatures ran riot through a Manhattan department store where Madchen Amick was trying to shop.
UPN’s Curse of the Talisman featured killer gargoyles, and in Robin Cook’s Acceptable Risk, from TBS, Chad Lowe discovered that a drug made out of a strange fungus had horrifying side effects.
Showtime’s On the Edge anthology featured a trio of actresses making their directorial debuts with three half-hour shorts: Helen Mirren’s ‘Happy Birthday’ was based on a Keith Laumer story and featured John Goodman, Beverly D’Angelo and Christopher Lloyd; Anthony LaPaglia starred as a terminally ill scientist in Mary Stuart Masterson’s ‘The Other Side’, based on a story by Bruce Holland Rogers, and the multi-talented Anne Heche both scripted and directed ‘Reaching Normal’ from Walter M. Miller’s short story, starring Andie MacDowell and Joel Grey.
In 2001, Buffy the Vampire Slayer lost its sense of humour, while spin-off series Angel finally found one, at least for a while. Vampire Spike (James Masters) fell in love with Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Buffy’s mother (Kristine Sutherland) died, and the evil god Glory (Clare Kramer) discovered that the hidden ‘Key’ she was searching for was actually Buffy’s younger sister Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg). The fifth season of Buffy ended with the 100th episode as the eponymous Slayer sacrificed her own life to save Dawn.
After very public arguments over the price paid per episode, the sixth season of Buffy moved from The WB to UPN in October with a two-hour premiere featuring Gellar as the android Buffy-bot. Once resurrected by Willow’s (Alyson Hannigan) dark magic, Buffy had hot sex with Spike, battled a trio of super-nerd villains and went to work in a fast-food outlet. Meanwhile, Willow allowed her use of magic to get out of control. The best episode was done entirely as a musical.
There were also rumours that Buffy creator Joss Whedon was developing a spin-off series for British character Giles (Anthony Stewart Head, who left the series after the first few episodes of the new season) which would be made in collaboration with the BBC. Buffy also finally went into syndication five nights a week on FX.
Meanwhile, over on Angel, the eponymous vampire’s (David Boreanaz) obsession with Wolfram & Hart broke up the team, which eventually reunited only to travel to The Host’s (Andy Hallett) alternate demon dimension. For the new season, Angel and his companions were joined by Amy Acker’s physicist Winifred ‘Fred’ Burke. Darla (Julie Benz) announced she was pregnant with Angel’s child, and Angel was pursued by an old enemy, vampire hunter Holtz (Keith Szarabajka), seeking revenge for the deaths of his family.
With David Duchovny’s Agent Mulder apparently gone for good, and Gillian Anderson’s Scully now a mother, the ninth season of Fox’s The X Files added Annabeth Gish’s FBI agent Monica Reyes as a full-time lead alongside Robert Patrick’s John Doggett. Cary Elwes joined the cast as an FBI assistant director, and former Xena actress Lucy Lawless also turned up for a couple of episodes.
Unfortunately, the quirky spin-off series The Lone Gunmen failed because it ignored the core genre audience that had made The X Files so successful.
The reworked pilot for CBS-TV’sWolf Lake was delayed after the terrorist attacks in September. Twin Peaks met The Howling as a Seattle detective (Lou Diamond Phillips) traced his missing girlfriend to the eponymous Pacific Northwest town where most of the humans turned into wolves. The hour-long series, created by John Leekley, lasted just eight episodes in America.
Yancy Butler starred as Sara Pezzini, a New York cop who used a mystical gauntlet to battle evil in the TNT series Witchblade, based on the Top Cow comic book.
After the series was renewed by The WB for three more seasons, actress Shannen Doherty quit Charmed as one of the witchy Halliwell sisters. In her final episode (which she also directed), Doherty’s character Prue was killed by a demon assassin. At the start of the new series, the remaining two sisters discovered that they had a long-lost half-sister who had magic of her own. After such actresses as Tiffani Thiessen and Jennifer Love Hewitt were reportedly considered, Rose McGowan joined the cast as Paige in a two-hour season premiere.
Dawson’s Creek met The X Files in the hit WB series Smallville, about the contemporary adventures of Clark Kent/Superboy (Tom Welling) and his friends Lana Lang (Kristin Kreuk) and Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum). Each episode usually involved green meteor fragments giving other people strange powers. John Glover had a recurring role as Lex’s industrialist father, Lionel Luthor.
In UPN’s All Souls, a young doctor (Grayson McCouch) began inquiring into a series of mysterious deaths in a hospital, while Rae Dawn Chong and Adrian Pasdar were back investigating mysteries and miracles in a second series of Mysterious Ways on PAX and NBC-TV.
The Sci Fi Channel’s The Chronicle was about a tabloid newspaper that researched bizarre but true stories, and The WB’s Dead Last was about the members of a rock band who obtained the power to see ghosts from a mysterious amulet.