REVIEW: DARK SHADOWS (M) (103min)
Directed by Tim Burton.
Starring Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Eva Green.
It's before my time, but I don't think the television show Dark Shadows ever screened in New Zealand.
I stared agog at YouTube all morning, and reading up on the show, and I'm pretty sure that the walkshort and cardigan wearers who were programming our telly back in 1968 would have quite spat their tea all over the cat if they'd been exposed to it.
Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, possessions, reincarnations... I 'd always kind of assumed that Dark Shadows was a kids' show; competition for The Munsters perhaps. But, no, this lunacy was conceived as a daytime soap opera.
It played in half hour episodes, five days a week, and pitted its undead beasties and their romantic tribulations up against Days of Our Lives and As the World Turns.
Tim Burton and David Lynch would bunk off school just to watch it, and I reckon if I'd been living in Los Angeles back then, then I might have too.
It's hysterical, camper than a boy scout jamboree, and oddly poignant and touching. I'm only surprised that it's taken 40 years to get around to making a big screen version.
Whether or not this Dark Shadows will please the die-hard fans of the show, I can't guess. The tone will be too jokey for some, but if you're a fan of Burton, and especially of his collaborations with Johnny Depp, then I'm guessing you'll enjoy this film a great deal.
Burton and Depp are the Scorsese and De Niro of extravagantly staged lunacy. Dark Shadows is their eighth film together.
And after the relative low of last year's Alice in Wonderland, it is a wonderful return to form. Depp, of course, plays Barnabas Collins, the undead scion of the Collins family, back from the grave after a 200 year internment to restore the mansion and fortunes of his descendants.
But the writers' first genius stroke is to set the film not in 'the present day' which was surely the original idea but in 1972, complete with lava lamps, macrame, swingers parties, The
Carpenters on the television, and Alice Cooper on the record player. Depp drops into this world like Edward Scissorhands all grown up.
The eternal black clad outsider with the old world manners and the peculiarly clipped tenor diction that has the local women quivering in their bell bottoms.
It's a fabulous characterisation, easily fascinating and robust enough to hang an entire film from, and that is exactly what Burton does.
Depp dominates every frame, with only Eva Green, madder than a sack of cobras, and sporting the red dress to end all red dresses, ever threatening to score a point off him.
Around Depp and Green, Michelle Pfeiffer and Helena Bonham Carter work well, while Chloe Grace Moritz (Kick Ass, Let Me In) continues her march to stardom like the astonishing wee talent she is.
It's an episodic film, occasionally marred by a sense that the cat are marking time waiting for the next big set piece to begin.
But when it moves, it moves very well indeed. Seth Grahame-Smith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) know his source material and genre inside out, and crafts a script that strikes a nice balance between affectionate and satiric.
Longtime Burton collaborators designer Rick Heinrichs and costume designer Colleen Atwood work here is as jaw droppingly over the top as ever, while Burton's direction is as meticulous, flamboyant, and intensely detailed as it will always be.
One note though.
There is a surprising amount of murder, bloodshed, and eroticism to this film, read the warnings on the M sticker, and don't take the under 10s please.
- © Fairfax NZ News
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