Dark Shadows

As many of you are well aware, I despise misleading trailers.  I hate them enough to bring it up whenever the possibility arises, and I’m always cautioning others to wait and talk to someone who has seen a movie if you’re on the fence about it.  There is nothing worse than walking into a theater with expectations of A, but being served B.

            Why do I bring this up? 

            On to the review!

            Before I get into why I feel like I was lied to, we must first answer a question:  What exactly is Dark Shadows?  Well, it’s an adored gothic soap opera that ran for hundreds and hundreds of episodes in the 1960’s and ‘70’s, was briefly revived in the 1990’s and turned into a TV movie in 2005.  So, yeah, it’s kinda popular.  You can call it the Dr. Who of fantasy soaps, only without enough studio backing to bring it back to stay.  Fortunately for fans, there was one man with the perfect amount of vision, gothic sensibilities and quirky humor who also had the clout to make it happen again, for the fourth time. 

            But was it worth reviving?

           

            In short:  Ehhhhhh.  Sure.  A little.  Maybe?

            My biggest problem with Dark Shadows is how everyone but Johnny Depp plays the straight man.  Actually, Depp also plays the straight man (or vampire, as it were).  Once again Tim Burton asks him to fall into the role of a very strange, fish-out-of-water character.  This time he is Barnabas Collins, a great, beloved man, cursed to be an undead vampire for eternity.  The curse comes about because he spurned the advances of a witch, Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green) and she decided that if she couldn’t have him, he’d just have to suffer for all eternity, buried alive.  Or is that buried undead?

            Of course, two hundred years later, his coffin is disturbed and he’s free to return home to the now-dilapidated Collins estate, where he finds the sad, pitiful remains of his once-mighty descendants.  You see, it wasn’t enough for Angelique to torture him.  She decided to stick around and make every Collins descendent suffer.  That’s right.  She was so obsessed over Barnabas that she feels she must ensure the Collins family slowly, pitifully slides into a mockery of their once-great power.

            Compared to the original soaps, the whole plot is fine, really. Well, except for one thing.  You see, every single damn trailer for Dark Shadows promised me a gothic comedy.  Every second of every trailer was jam-packed with quirky characters, oddball situations and general fantastical silliness that sold me on a goofy, gently mocking take on the original.

            What was delivered ended up being a dark, depressing film that only delivers its humor via Barnabas’s observations and poorly timed comments.  On top of that, the humor falls flat after the first half-dozen ‘oh goodness look at this crazy technology, are you sure it isn’t Satan?’ jokes.  To be brutally honest, the jokes are one-note and cease to be in any way humorous after about 45 minutes.  That leaves almost 75 minutes of humorless, colorless movie.  Even worse, most of the truly clever jokes were in the trailer.

            I’m not saying that this film is bad.  I’m saying that it’s absolutely not what you may have been looking for.  It’s misleading, and that’s a shame.  I don’t think I would have gone out of my way to watch it if the trailers were honest, but I like to think that Burton and Depp would have delivered a better product if the studio had put more pressure on them, rather than just making a misleading trailer.

            As for everyone else in the movie, they’re pretty much single-note characters.  Eva Green isn’t impressive as the bad guy.  In fact, the camera makes her cleavage more important than her emotions. Michelle Pfeiffer is fine as the matron of the Collins family, but she’s not given much to work with.  Helena Bonham Carter and Chloe Grace Moretz are completely wasted in their roles; Moretz especially is creepy as an over-sexualized teenager, delivering all her lines with a constant sneer.  It’s unsettling, and not in a cinematically impressive way.

            Nobody else stands out, just as nothing in Dark Shadows stands out.  It’s blandly predictable, and I really think Tim Burton needs to take a break from filmmaking for a while or try something radically different.  Maybe a buddy cop comedy or a war movie?

            What I’m trying to say is, go see The Avengers again.  If you really like Dark Shadows, you’ll be fine with this version.  Same goes for those of you that really like Johnny Depp in white face paint.  For everyone else, this movie won’t make you a fan of the series, and it may even deter you from checking out the weird, oddly entertaining originals that I used to watch on SciFi during my summer vacations.