ViewGuide

Created May 27, 2012 09:52PM PST • Edited May 02, 2021 02:58AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Great 4.0

   There’s lots to sink your teeth into – lots to like and chew over – in the reimagining of Dark Shadows. Camp-classic TV soap opera, it stands up to eccentric genius Tim Burton’s silver screen amplification.
   Who cares that the LOLs are a bit strained.

   Chortles count as laughs and Dark Shadows triggers more than a few of those.

   Johnny Depp never strains as Barnabas Collins, 18th century dandy turned vampire dropped into the 1970s. Depp’s droll otherness is perfect for a largely fish-out-of-water comedy.

   Droll melodrama is a tough ticket when it comes to LOLs however, even with Burton’s peerless craftsmanship and a generally great cast. Young moviegoers in particular might be less than charmed, given that they didn’t experience the original Dark Shadows or the Me Decade.

   OTOH, millennials love vampires. And Johnny Depp’s Barnabas Collins is a charming new bloodsucker. The movie tees up a sequel at the end, suggesting that his appeal will prove undead, er, undying.

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   How iconic is Johnny Depp? Standing behind a wannabe twentysomething at the ticket counter, I heard him ask for “that movie Johnny Depp’s in.” Dark Shadows didn’t mean squat to him, but Depp did.

   His faith was rewarded with another pitch perfect performance by the master of daffy drollness. Indeed, Barnabas Collins goes into the section of the Depp canon previously monopolized by Captain Jack Sparrow. Many of the lines in Dark Shadows come alive solely via his delivery. That’s star power.

   Three female leads play opposite him. Eva Green is glamorous without being pretty. Michelle Pfeiffer is glamorous with grace, a rare combination. Anyway, Green makes a worthy enemy, Pfeiffer a terrific ally. Then there’s Bella Heathcote, lovely and whip smart. This Aussie actress is going far.

   Pfeiffer and Depp lead a well-casted Collins family that also includes a precocious child-star, an aging Lothario and a fresh-faced newcomer.

   • Chloë Grace Moretz spends most of the movie acting like a stoned runway model, and does it well. Let’s hope this child star survives playing kids with adult pathologies, first as Hit-Girl in Kick-Ass and now Carolyn Stoddard in Dark Shadows.
   • Jonny Lee Miller, the first Mr. Angelina Jolie, is appropriately smarmy as a coddled Collins man.
   • Gulliver McGrath is touching as his young son, David. Keep an eye out for McGrath as Honest Abe’s son in Spielberg’s Lincoln later this year.

   The two other notable players are Helena Bonham Carter as an alcoholic psychiatrist and Jackie Earle Haley as a lackey. While not either’s best work, these are two great character actors. Perhaps they’ll settle into their roles in the sequel.

   Cameos include Alice Cooper (“Ugliest woman I’ve ever seen,” says Barnabas), the great Christopher Lee, and Jonathan Frid, the original Barnabas. Frid died shortly before the movie premiered. Or did he…

5. Male Stars Perfect 5.0

   Depp

6. Female Stars Really Great 4.5

7. Female Costars Good 3.0

8. Male Costars Good 3.0

10. Film

    Great 4.0

    The humor never gets off-the-hook, as it’s weighted down by the melodrama. Still, the visual brilliance and chockablock ideas are transfixing, while the droll humor manages to regularly strike its target.

11. Direction Perfect 5.0

    Timothy Burton, let us sing your praises. Starts out this film as a well-wrought period piece, reminiscent of the beginning of his Sweeney Todd, then transitions to a naturalistic 70s vibe for the title credits and opening scenes of the main arc. Few directors can pull off either, let alone smoothly juxtapose the two.

12. Play Good 3.0

13. Music Really Great 4.5

    Conspicuously skips most of the killer music of the day, instead featuring B-sides and bad AM hits. Still, the atmosphere is well set, as is the irony.

14. Visuals Perfect 5.0

    Collinswood Manor is a wonder to behold: as it’s being constructed, in its dusty dotage and then as it is gloriously rehabbed, after which it comes alive. ALIVE I SAY!

15. Content

16. Edge

    Sordid 3.1

    Note that Eva Green’s witch only removes her panties when she drapes them over Johnny Depp’s vampire face before locking him in his coffin. They never leave her body during their spectacular sex scene earlier. Just saying.

    As to the bloodsucking, it ain’t so bad as 21st century vampire movies go, though it’s plenty sufficient to establish Barnabas Collins’ street cred.

17. Sex Erotic 2.8

    Barnabas has the sexual standards of early James Bond. Friends, enemies and lovers are all fair game.

18. Violence Savage 3.7

19. Rudeness Profane 2.8

21. Reality

    Supernatural 3.9

    My curse is broken. What curse?

    Here’s my tale. Coming along at the tail end of the Baby Boomers, I was just a tot when Barnabas Collins ruled daytime TV, and was properly terrified of him and the show. Now a grown man, I’m free of the childhood curse of credulity, seeing instead a $150,000,000 production full of three dozen stuntmen and hundreds of digital artists and model makers. Undead? How about exquisitely unreal.

22. Circumstantial Surreal 2.6

23. Biological Fantasy 5.0

24. Physical Fantasy 4.1