Dark Shadows

Tim Burton – 2012 – USA 
  

I wouldn’t deny the common charge that a Tim Burton film has basically become a pretty predictable commodity by this point, but it’s a product I still enjoy most of the time.  We all know what to expect and Burton provides exactly that; a bit of the macabre, a little humor, an effete Johnny Depp, pale porcelain skin, Halloween trimmings, Danny Elfman music, a very sloppily written finale, and Helena Bonham Carter.  Since Sleepy Hollow (1999), it seems his chosen modus operandi is to adapt or remake existing stories and put his personal stamp on them.  Maybe he exhausted his original ideas with Edward Scissorhands (1990), but that doesn’t mean that he’s any less capable of making great films.  He still has yet to surpass the masterpiece Ed Wood (1994), though.  Well, Dark Shadows is a remake of the 60s horror soap starring Jonathan Frid, (who makes a momentary cameo here, of course).  Johnny Depp plays Barnabas Collins, a vampire who’s been entombed alive for 200 years and is finally set free in 1972.  More than the actual source material, it’s really the Hammer film Dracula A.D. 1972 that Burton is referencing, putting a comic twist on the campy but lackluster horror flick that was Hammer’s cost-saving move to bring Dracula into the 20th century; (the star of that film, Christopher Lee, pops up in a cameo here in Dark Shadows too).  I really liked the melancholy, nostalgic tone that Burton creates; never going too overboard with period décor and music; (a little overboard maybe, but not too overboard).  As always, though, an overall wackiness tends to be used to gloss over the shallowness of the characterizations.  That’s something I really wish Burton would overcome one of these days.  The film is actually thoroughly enjoyable up until the final act, which is always where Burton starts fumbling the ball.  But its strengths lie in the themes that have long been central to him; alienation and the pros and cons of relating to community.