Be Afraid of the Dark

Several months back, I wrote about Danny Elfman's score to the new movie Dark Shadows, which at that point in time I had not seen. Regrettably, I have addressed that situation.

I've never watched a single episode of the original soap opera on which this film is based, but I was a fan of the short-lived 1991 revival series. Over 13 episodes, the revival apparently re-told one of the more well-received storylines of the original series, and I found great fun in how earnestly it was all presented.

That's the big problem with Tim Burton's film adaptation -- it doesn't strike the right tone at all. Apparently, what Burton, Johnny Depp, and all the other creative powers behind the film remember of the original TV show is a campy tone. Never mind that most television of the era comes off hokey today; never mind that the series was made on a shoestring budget. It seems they extracted a desire to make a deliberately campy movie.

To deliver the script, they turned to Seth Grahame-Smith, author of Price and Prejudice and Zombies, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, and others. He took all the raw characters from the series, but threw them into a quirky script that never quite commits. At times, the movie seems to want to be serious, making Depp's vampire character of Barnabas Collins into a genuinely scary creature. The film holds enough reverence for the original material that it doesn't want to mock it outright. But at other times, the movie seems to want to be a gentle parody of the TV series, with lots of 1972 period jokes and stupid fish-out-of-water gags. Someone like a Joss Whedon is able to pull off this kind of blending of horror and humor, but this film comes nowhere near that level of sophistication. Instead, you're always keenly aware of a movie not funny enough to be a comedy, not scary enough to be a horror, not serious enough to be dramatically compelling, and not exciting enough to be an action movie.

What's more, the movie isn't even good enough to tell a story that can stand on its own. There seems to be a lot of track laid for some imagined potential franchise. Several threads are needlessly introduced or left dangling, for no apparent reason other than to set up the Dark Shadows 2 we'll surely (thankfully) never see.

There are several good actors in the movie, but most of them are either under-utilized, or playing versions of something they've done in earlier films. Johnny Depp falls into his new routine with Burton, adopting a new strange accent and stranger appearance to portray someone more caricature than character. Michelle Pfeiifer is the drab family matriarch, a wet blanket used mainly for exposition. Helena Bonham Carter pulls from a familiar bag of "unhinged" tricks, but they seem far less compelling that what you saw in Fight Club or the Harry Potter movies. Chloë Grace Moretz seems fun for a time as a moody teenager, until a twist at the end reveals that she was probably just cast on her pedigree of movies like Kick-Ass and Let Me In.

There are some good visuals in the movie, and some fun, gothic-inspired set design. But that and the clever Danny Elfman score I reviewed those months ago are about the only reasons to watch this movie. And that's not nearly enough. I give Dark Shadows a D+. It's best avoided.