Johnny Depp portrays Barnabas Collins in a scene from "Dark Shadows." / Peter Mountain/Warner Bros.
‘Dark Shadows’
Rated: PG-13 for comic horror violence, sexual content, some drug use, language and smoking.
Star rating:★ ½
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'Dark Shadows' a mere shadow of its campy self
All dressed up and no place to go.
That pretty well describes “Dark Shadows,” Tim Burton’s take on the ’60s gothic soap opera, which features Johnny Depp as a bleached-out Barnabas Collins. It’s a cool-looking film, and it has some sense of the creepy fun you would expect from Burton, at least in places. But it seems hollow, somehow false, even by its own campy standards. What’s worse, the story, written by Seth Grahame-Smith and John August, just doesn’t try hard enough, running out of ideas before it’s even halfway told.
A prologue set in the 18th century establishes that, like in the TV show, Barnabas is turned into a vampire by Angelique (Eva Green), a witch whose love he rejects. She chains him and locks him in a coffin, burying him alive.
Cut to 1972 in Collinsport, Maine, the town founded by Barnabas’ parents. Collinwood Manor, the ancestral home, has fallen into disrepair, the family fishing business has been largely usurped by a competitor, and what’s left of the Collins family no longer occupies a central role in the town — a bunch of outcasts is more like it. Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer) struggles to keep the business afloat, but she gets no help from her thieving brother Roger (Jonny Lee Miller). Her teenage daughter Carolyn (Chloe Grace Moretz) is rebellious in a ’70s sort of way, while Roger’s son David (Gulliver McGrath) struggles to get over the drowning of his mother and claims to see her ghost. The family has hired live-in psychiatrist Julia Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter) to work with David, but she mostly drinks the day away. They’ve also hired Victoria Winters (Bella Heathcote) as a governess.
Then one night, construction workers unearth Barnabas’ coffin and free him. Big mistake. Soon he is living in Collinwood Manor, with only Elizabeth in on his secret. However, his presence is soon discovered by the owner of the Collins’ competitor in the fishing business, Angelique Bouchard — the same Angelique that cursed Barnabas and his family centuries earlier.
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Fans of the TV series will recognize character names and note similarities to the original. It’s somewhat promising up to this point, with Barnabas vowing to win back both the family business and its good name.
So now what? No one really seems sure. Burton relies on anachronistic humor — Barnabas not understanding the world he’s been released in — to somewhat good effect, mostly because Depp is good at that sort of thing. But a little goes a long way, and you can’t build a whole movie on it. It’s probably silly to complain about lack of character development in a campy movie based on a soap opera, but other than Barnabas and Angelique, the other characters just sort of come and go, as needed, nothing more.
That said, bonus points for not only including Alice Cooper (as himself) in the cast, but for using the often-overlooked classic “Ballad of Dwight Fry” in an appropriate manner in a scene — a rare case of the soundtrack being used to further the story and not as comic relief or cultural shortcut.
The movie plays as if Hollywood executives said, hey, a “Dark Shadows” movie would be a fun project — and never looked in on it again.
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'Dark Shadows' a mere shadow of its campy self
All dressed up and no place to go. That pretty well describes 'Dark Shadows,' Tim Burton's take on the '60s gothic soap opera, which features Johnny Depp as a bleached-out Barnabas Collins.
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