Dark Shadows
starring Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Eva Green, Jackie Earl Haley, Jonny Lee Miller, Chloë Grace Moretz, Bella Heathcote, Gully McGrath, with Alice Cooper and Christopher Lee
screenplay by Seth Grahame-Smith
directed by Tim Burton
Rating: ♦♦♦♦◊
Based on the television series created by Don Curtis Dark Shadows was good but it should have been better. Depp plays Barnabus Collins, an early New England colonist turned into a vampire by the curse of a spurned woman and witch. Buried alive by the terrified townspeople Barnabus is accidentally revived in 1971 and this time slip fuels the comedy. Barnabus is trapped in a world he didn’t create. He has to interpret everything in his eighteenth century paradigm.
Even though Barnabus is a vampire, he’s not a monster and he conscientiously devotes himself to reviving his family’s surviving business interests in town and rehabilitating his surviving relations.
But as I say, the film should have been funnier. Director Tim Burton diffused the effect somewhat by over-indulging on monsters. There are vampires and witches and even werewolves appear in the final real. Any one of those ought to have sufficed for a movie.