Cult Movie Review: Dark Shadows (2012)

The
feature film remake of Dark Shadows has arrived in theaters and Tim Burton fans are faced with his least-satisfying genre comedy since Mars Attacks ( 1996).




While
I don’t feel that Dark Shadows is a Planet of the Apes (2001)-sized creative
debacle, it’s probably a close call.  This is one
wildly uneven, incredibly incoherent movie. 
Those who will feel most abused by Burton’s Dark Shadows re-imagination
are likely the long-term fans of the afternoon soap opera, which ran on TV from
1966 – 1971.  




And
that’s because this is a jokey and campy update of the serious Gothic material
presented there.  The themes, tropes and
situations of the much-cherished series have been spun to support an entirely
Burton-esque fish-out-of-water comedy, but one lacking the heart and
emotionality of Big Fish (2002) or Edward Scissorhands (1992).  Barnabas -- the great Byronic vampire who came before Anne Rice’s Lestat, Forever Knight’s Nick Knight, Joss
Whedon’s Angel and Stephanie Meyers’ Edward Cullen – is now a confused
misfit tilting at lava lamps and other fads of the 1970s.




And
I’m afraid that’s the good news...




Dark
Shadows
recounts the tragic life of noble Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp).  Born in Liverpool, he traveled to America
with his family in the late 18th century and watched as his father
created a fishing and cannery empire. 
Unfortunately, as he became a man, Collins caught the eye of a lustful family
servant, Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green). 
Barnabas rejected her romantic 

advances, and she cursed him for it. 




First,
Angelique killed the love of his life, Josette (Bella Heathcote), and then she
used black magic to turn Barnabas into a vampire.  Angelique then turned the ungrateful people
of Collinsport against him, and Barnabas was buried in the woods…for eternity.




But
in the year 1972, Barnabas is freed from captivity, and sets out to restore his
family business and reputation, and find love in the person of young Victoria
Winters (Heathcote).  The bad news is
that Angelique is still nearby, and still carrying a torch for Barnabas…literally.




Tim
Burton’s Dark Shadows works best – for
a short while, anyway -- as a comedy of manners in which a 200-year old
vampire struggles to understand life and etiquette in the year 1972.  He mistakes McDonalds for Mephistopheles, rock
star Alice Cooper for the world’s “ugliest woman,” and judges sexy women by the
size and shape of their “birthing” hips.  He doesn’t know about cars, roads, television,
female doctors, psychiatry, or even Erich Segal’s Love Story (1970). 




While
John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) plays at a local theater, Barnabas hopes to
be delivered from his eternal curse of vampirism.  But what he really suffers from is permanent
befuddlement at a world that has passed him by.




I
can’t lie about this fact: some of this fish-out-of-water material is quite funny.
The film’s jokes work more often than not, especially in Depp’s capable,
deadpan hands.  One exceptionally funny
bit involves Barnabas’s introduction to the Collins family at the breakfast
table, wherein he comments on how, specifically, he knows the family silver
utensils have been replaced.  Another
funny – if decidedly low-brow –
moment involves Barnabas’s description of “balls” (meaning a celebratory gathering,
not testicles), and the ensuing double-entendres and innuendo on the topic.




Burton
also does a tremendous amount of heavy lifting – probably a little too much -- with the abundant 1970s era soundtrack,
which is utilized as biting contrast to Collins’s serious but antiquarian proclamations
of purpose and nobility. 




Accordingly,
before the movie is over, we are treated to Superfly, My
First, My Last, My Everything by Barry White, and the Carpenters’ Top of the World. These songs work
splendidly in context of the film’s fish-out-of-water humor, and so for a while
Dark
Shadows is actually pretty damn entertaining.  The first half-hour or forty-five minutes
rollicks along with good humor, grace, and Burton’s trademark visual ingenuity.




Yet
my sense of conflict and ambivalence about the film emerges from the
inescapable fact that the sturdy premise is played entirely for laughs. In no
sense is the subject matter respected or vetted in a faithful manner.  This Barnabas is not a tortured, tragic,
Byronic figure, and his relations with the Collins family are mined for humor
but not pathos or even intrigue.  The
film’s sense of reality is thus paper thin and easily crumpled.




The
upshot of this lampoon-style approach is that by Dark Shadow’s third act
we’ve lost all sense of concern about this universe, and so don’t really care at
all what becomes of the characters. 
Spectacular special effects inform the film’s fiery finale -- with Angelique starting to crack and crumble
like a porcelain doll -- but you can’t move yourself to care about who wins
or who loses the conflict.




Long
story short: Burton can’t ask us to laugh at Barnabas’s reality for most of the
film, and then suddenly attempt to turn Dark Shadows into a serious and
consequential battle between good and evil. 
For one thing, the movie never quite squares the fact that Barnabas is
indeed the protagonist, but that he wantonly murders innocent people too.  Thus the movie never decides what Barnabas
should be as a character, except a non-stop joke-producing machine.  It reminds me of the 1998 Godzilla .   There, no effort was made to determine whether
we should love the monster, consider him just an animal, or consider him an
evil terror.   Similarly, in Dark
Shadows we are never sure to how to categorize Barnabas.  He’s funny and likable, but he’s also weird
and murderous.  We might want him to find
love and happiness, but he should also be held accountable for his blood shed.




What
can Dark
Shadows fans hold onto here? 




Since
this is a Burton film, many of the visuals dazzle.   That’s a claim you can’t really make of the
original TV soap opera, which was constrained by low budgets and cardboard interior
sets.  The prologue of Burton’s film is
breath-taking in terms of landscape, camera movement and special effects.  I’ll go out on a limb and even state that the
world of Dark Shadows – from the
town of Collinsport to the Collinswood Estate – has never appeared in such
epic or impressive terms.  The sweeping,
majestic prologue, which is Gothic Extreme (literally, with a double cliff
diving stunt…), is very impressive. 




By
the same token, Burton’s Dark Shadows’ benefits from the fact
that it knows the full “story” of Barnabas from beginning to end. The soap
opera was often painfully slow, and moved along in fits and starts.  As I recall, Barnabas did not even appear
until sometime early into the run.  And
Angelique appeared even later than that. 
This Dark Shadows gets to dramatize the whole epic, century-spanning
story, and without daily soap opera distractions.  And yet – again
– it does so entirely with tongue-in-cheek, and with little coherence or point.




Watching
Dark
Shadows I felt firmly that it was more a Burton fantasy than a
legitimate adaptation of Dan Curtis’s beloved series.  Here, we get an allusion to Martin Landau’s
Bela Lugosi (from Ed Wood ) in Barnabas’s hypnosis-by-hand.  We also get the outsider attempting to build
a family for himself while facing the scorn of the community ( Edward
Scissorhands ).  We get the tragic
back story of a child, like we saw in Sleepy Hollow (1999).  And like Beetlejuice , the supernatural world
is portrayed here as half-crazed and half-frightening. 




But
the script is hopelessly incoherent, with long periods of narrative inertia and
dullness. Victoria Winters – the love of
Barnabas’s life – disappears from the action for long stretches of the film
with no explanation.  And the opening and
closing narrations are trite, meaningless book-end bromides about “blood” being
thicker than water.  Yet the ending quote
shows no development and no knowledge learned since the opening quote.  Everything between these book ends is just
episodic hemming and hawing.




Sure,
Burton can forge lyrical, unforgettable imagery.  Here, that imagery includes the ghost of
Josette clinging to a luminescent chandelier, or a death-defying plunge from
the Sleepy
Hollow -esque Widow’s Hill.  And I
love the idea of the brittle Angelique cracking like a porcelain doll, hollowed
out inside because of her centuries of consuming hatred.  In almost rapturous moments such as these,
Burton summons meaningful visuals from the depths of his twisted imagination.  But there’s no compelling hook on which to
hang them, and so they are interesting momentarily but without larger resonance
in the body of the film.




If
you’re a fan of Dark Shadows , I recommend you stay away from this remake and
continue to enjoy the series for what it was.  And if you’re a devoted fan of Tim Burton, you
may get a kick out of the film’s first half, if not much more




Just
try to imagine Burton and Depp – to quote
Elizabeth Collins (Michelle Pfeiffer) -- “on a better day.”