Dark Shadows Movie Review

Many year ago there was a television soap opera called Dark Shadows, that ran from 1966 to 1971. While originally not intending to have supernatural elements in it, the show eventually featured ghosts, vampires, werewolves, witches, zombies, time travel, and parallel universes. Directors Tim Burton and Quentin Tarantino have publicly stated they were fans of the TV show. Johnny Depp was obsessed with the show as a child and wanted to be the prominent vampire character, Barnabas Collins. Well, if Tim Burton and Johnny Depp liked Dark Shadows so much, a movie (2012) was inevitable.

In 1772, Barnabas (Johnny Depp) has the world at his feet until he makes the grave mistake of breaking the heart of Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green). A witch in every sense of the word, Angelique dooms him to a fate worse than death: turning him into a vampire and burying him alive. Two centuries later, Barnabas is inadvertently freed from his tomb and emerges into the very changed world of 1972. He returns to Collinwood Manor to find that his once-grand estate has fallen into ruin. The Dysfunctional remnants of the Collins family have fared little better, each harboring their own dark secrets; the inhabitants include Elizabeth Collins (Michelle Pfeiffer) who runs the family fortune, her teenage daughter Carolyn (Chloe Grace Mortez), Elizabeth's useless brother Roger (Jonny Lee Miller), Roger's Disturbed son David (Gully McGrath), and a live-in psychiatrist named Dr. Julia Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter). Even after centuries have passed, Angelique shows up to wreak havoc on the Collins family and tear them apart.

I think Tim Burton films are fun and I love watching Johnny Depp perform. The director and actor duo tend to produce movies that are fun to watch, even if a little strange. Dark Shadows was chockful of Tim Burton's signature Gothic style; weird angles, vividly contrasting colors, elaborate sets and costumes, a variety of wacky characters, and often dark humor. If you're a fan of Tim Burton, you will not be disappointed by the rich and strange visuals Burton is known for.

Since the role of Barnabas Collins was a childhood dream of Depp's you can rest assured that his performance is pitch perfect and intense. You'd think that with the dark and often strange roles Depp portrays, he would have been a vampire at least once before, but this is a first for him. Barnabas is a 18th-century  Englishman who has awakened in the 1970's; he treats people with elaborate courtesy. Depp's performance is haughty and mannered, as it probably should be for the character. But on the other hand, so is the performance of every other actor. This creates a sort of strange style in the movie's overall presentation that seems to teeter between satire and being snooty to the audience. That may have been intentional to captivate the  melodramatic quality of the original TV show, but it felt a bit weird to me.

A problem with trying to capture all the fun stuff from the TV show in a movie is that the movie seemed rushed. The back story in the introduction, while very well done, probably could have been a movie all by itself. The Dark Shadows movie had a huge cast and never seemed to give enough screen time to any of the characters other than Barnabas and Angelique. So when some of the Collin's family secrets come into play, it seem to be an all too convenient plot device rather than a logical twist in character development. I don't even know why Barnabas's love interest developed; the two characters have maybe two short scenes together.

Dark Shadows was really fun. It was highly stylized in a classic Tim Burton fashion and we had a great performance from Johnny Depp. While the story started out promising, it seemed rushed and didn't seem to know where it was going most of the time. The humor mostly centered around Barnabas's reaction to 1970's pop culture, which is usually good for a few laughs. It averages out to be a fun movie, but not necessarily a good one. If you're a fan of Tim Burton or Johnny Depp, Dark Shadows is worth owning. But even if you're not a fan, I still recommend renting it at least because it's so fun.

Is there a TV show you'd love to see made into a movie? I think a Gilligan's Island movie might be cool, or possibly Blake's 7. Comment below and tell me what you think!

Fright Night

After feeling betrayed by Hollywood with their recent array of rubbish vampire movies, I wasn’t excited to see Fright Night (2011), a remake of a 1985 vampire horror movie by the same name. That is until I heard The Doctor David Tennant was in it. It instantly became a much higher priority. I don’t typically care for horror movies, but this one was actually really good!

High School senior Charlie Brewster (Anton Yelchin) finally has it all; he’s running with the popular crowd and dating the hottest girl in school, Amy (Imogen Poots). He’s become so cool he’s begun avoiding his old friend Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Trouble arrives when an intriguing character named Jerry (Collin Farrell) moves in next door to Charlie. Jerry seems like a great guy at first, but there’s something not quite right about him, and only Ed and Charlie seem to notice. After witnessing some very strange activity, Charlie comes to an unmistakable conclusion: Jerry is a vampire preying on the neighborhood. Unable to convince anyone of the truth, Charlie has to find a way to get rid of the monster himself, even if that means enlisting the aid of a truly bizarre Las Vegas occult magician Peter Vincent (David Tennant).

One of the early scenes in Fright Night had a very paranoid Ed trying to convince Charlie that Jerry is a vampire. Charlie accuses Ed of reading too much Twilight. Reasonably so, Ed is offended by this, and argues that Twilight vampires are make-believe and really stupid. Not only was this hilarious, but it was communicating to the audience that the vampire in this film is not going to be the pansy, sparkly variety who knows what you’re feeling and wants to take you to the prom. THIS vampire is the way vampires are supposed to be: undead, demonic monsters from hell, bent of draining the life force of the innocent to sustain their existence as one of the damned. With all the romanticized and sexualized vampire movies, TV shows, and literature that has emerged in recent years, having a truly frightening monster out for blood was oddly quite refreshing! Besides, anything that makes fun of Twilight is good in my book.

I also have to give credit to a film that causes me to withdraw previous statements. I’ve said that horror and comedy are thematically at odds with each other and don’t fit well in the same movie together. Fright Night was a comedy horror movie, and it was a hoot! They argue that “Jerry” is a terrible name for a vampire, they complain about the quality of vampire hunting gear won on eBay, and Charlie’s mother (Toni Collette) makes references to the 1960’s TV show Dark Shadows.

Fight Night does horror really well, too. Since movies like Saw came out, the horror genre has degenerated from stories that induce feelings of horror and terror to stories that simply gross out the audience. There’s a big difference; getting a buzz saw blade lodged in your face is gross, holding your breath to try and remain undetected by a monster in its own lair is scary. There are scenes in Fright Night that filled me with dread while other scenes had me laughing.

Teens are the target audience for this movie. Most teen horror flicks feature characters that are intent on having sex, partying, experimenting with drugs, and underage drinking and the like. Fright Night was curiously much more conservative. The story focuses more on Charley’s changing relationship with Ed, rather than on Charley’s sexual interest in his girlfriend. On top of that, Charlie is trying to protect his single mother from making bad choices with bad boy next door. Charlie even becomes less interested in sex the more time he spends hunting down Jerry. The movie isn’t about sexual conquests of the adolescent male; it’s about Charlie making conscious choices to protect the women in his life from the “bad boys” out there. I don’t see this kind of thing in movies aimed at teens very often, it was a pleasant change of pace.

Fright Night is fairly clean for a horror movie. Since it’s a vampire movie, we get to see an abundance of blood splatter, but we don’t see much disembowelment and such. There’s some immodesty, but no full on nudity. There’s quite a bit of profanity, though, especially after the comically bitter and sarcastic Peter Vincent shows up. I didn’t care for that, but it fit into the character well, so I can’t really fault the movie for it.

Fright Night was a really fun comedy-horror movie, and the best contemporary vampire movie I’ve seen in years. It was fun, it had some good writing and directing, excellent actors, it was funny and scary, and had some great special effects and cinematography. Best of all, there are actual vampires in this vampire movie; it shows us, in a fresh and interesting way, the traditional vampires that people with any taste will know and love. Fright Night is worth seeing. I don’t even like horror movies that much and I enjoyed it enough to want a copy on Blu-Ray. Some content (such as the profanity) won’t settle well with some viewers, so be conscientious of that before seeing it.

What is your favorite Comedy-Horror movie? Why did you like it so much? Comment below and tell me all about it!