It's interesting to note that as this film has approached, the marketing has done its work, and the first reactions have started coming out, that fans of the television series on which it is based have mostly been opposed to the very idea of Burton's take on it (the trailer makes it look every bit a comedy) – even going so far as to boycott it entirely in some quarters – while the majority of actual ticket buyers have emerged with that old complaint, "all the funny bits were in the trailer"…
I guess I fall somewhere between these two main bases in the "why make a movie of Dark Shadows?" department. I think the title had been on my periphery some time last year but it was around Christmas, I think, when I listened to this old episode of This American Life, when I first really started thinking about Dark Shadows. I've become quite the old telly addict over the past year or so, and when I found that all 1225 episodes of the 1966-71 TV show (minus one, which has been reconstructed) are still in existence, I couldn't resist the challenge to at least get as far as episode 211, when Barnabas Collins – the main reason for this film's existence, due to the impact he had on a young Johnny Depp once upon a time – appears.
I wasn't sure of the series at all at first, but I soon became fond of its shambolic nature… then, before I knew it – around Laura Collins' first story I guess – the last major storyline before Barnabas' arrival – I found myself genuinely hooked, watching in 7 or 8 episode chunks, and I'm likely to carry on watching the full series over the next year or so. In short, I looked forward to seeing what they did with it as a feature film.
A more difficult factor for me – one which frankly had me bewildered at one point why I was so excited to see this film – is Tim Burton. A number of Burton's earlier films are high up – and unmoving – in my top movies of all time (Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns), but in the past 10 years or so I haven't really understood what he's been doing. I enjoyed Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for the more elaborate Violet transformation and some of the songs, I can't think of a better Sweeney Todd film than the one he made (though as I mentioned on Twitter when I watched it recently, I think he and Johnny Depp push it too far towards comedy over tragedy) – but when it comes to Alice in Wonderland, Planet of the Apes, and to a certain extent even Big Fish and Corpse Bride (both of which I admit I'd like to see again – after all, I initially loathed Mars Attacks! and now adore it), I can't help but feel his style has consumed the substance of his earlier work.
It's been a while since I felt the need to set up a review as elaborately as above lol, I can only apologise but sometimes I need to be clear where I'm coming from… now then, what of Dark Shadows?
Well the people saying "all the funny bits are in the trailer" should really be making the hardcore fans avoiding this movie think twice… the relative absence of humour from the movie compared to what the trailer promises doesn't mean the movie is bad, just badly marketed. This isn't to say I didn't laugh plenty in the movie, either. The whole Alice Cooper bit (which is stretched to a valiant degree without losing its humour) and a simply mad surprise involving Chloe Moretz towards the end are things not in the trailer that made me laugh a lot (in the latter case a little too loud and a little too long *blushes*).
If you were to ask me "what is it, if not a comedy?" though, I'd struggle to find an easy answer. 'Cos it's not black comedy either. I mentioned on Twitter while watching Sweeney Todd recently that I haven't given up on Tim Burton yet because it feels like he's trying to do something even when it isn't necessarily working. I think he mastered black comedy way back with Beetlejuice and like any artist, he isn't really interested in doing the same thing over and over again, much as though it might seem that way sometimes. I think with Dark Shadows, even though it is by no means a great or even good movie, he comes the closest he has in a long time to something resembling a new blend of dark and light.
As a new fan of the TV show, I'd only just made it as far as the first 10-15 episodes featuring Barnabas, which are actually quite light as far as his contribution goes. But I'd certainly got to know the present day Collinses and Stoddards and Vicky Winters, as well as some of the ghosts that appear in the movie. So I've no idea where the TV series takes everything nor how much of the story here may be taken from the source, but I think I read that they never resolved the mystery of Vicky Winters' origin – why she's there at Collinwood, for example, who her parents were – and I was fairly impressed with the "joining the dots" that has taken place in adapting the show for the big screen, characters slightly mixed up here and there, Willie Loomis being at Collinwood before Vicky, for example, Vicky's "original" name, stuff like that.
I was surprised there were barely any in-jokey references to the TV series for the original fans, since Burton, Pfeiffer and Depp have made quite a big deal about being such fans in interviews about this movie. I understand why – why they wouldn't aim this movie at fans of the TV series particularly internationally, like here in England where I don't believe the show ever aired (ah, correction: according to this it may have been on cable/Sky in the 1990s) – but I thought at least we'd get the big title superimposed over Collinwood, some of the bad music perhaps played in the Blue Whale pub, little things like that.
Knowing that Chloe Moretz was playing Carolyn in the movie, I knew the character would be a lot different from the show where she's not necessarily old but certainly older than 15 – I certainly didn't expect her character to practically steal the show even from Depp here. Even if the rest of this movie had been unwatchable, I think I would be pre-ordering it on blu-ray just to sit alongside the other Moretz movies in my collection. The incongruous treatment of her as a 70s teen, especially by Barnabas, was the most pleasant surprise of all here ("Carolyn touches herself… she makes noises like a kitten…"), and the mad turn her character takes, as I said… well you either go with it or you don't, and I went with it…
The movie Dark Shadows brought most to mind was Robert Zemeckis' Death Becomes Her …a movie that seems to metamorphose every time I catch it on TV, is never quite as good as I remember, and also if I remember correctly had a trailer that featured gags that didn't even show up in the movie… a black comedy with aspirations toward something perhaps greater that ended up really being neither funny nor profound, but which I somehow can't resist watching whenever the opportunity comes up. The Dark Shadows television series was an infamously shambolic mess, so you can almost assume that the similar shambles story wise, tone wise, everything wise, here was possibly deliberate on Burton's part. I find myself happier with the Tim Burton who feels like this madness is good enough than the Burton who seemed to be entirely absent on his other recent work which, though it looked fantastic, just didn't have half the interesting spark of Dark Shadows.
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2012 at 9:27 pm and is filed under 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
