Dark Shadows - review

Johnny Depp and Eva Green get their Munster moment in Tim Burton's Gothic parody
11 May 2012

Tim Burton loves a bit of Gothic, and there’s a heap of it in Dark Shadows. The title will be vaguely familiar to those who remember the cult US daytime telly series in the Sixties. This is a parody and a homage to it.

The master of the successful Collins family is Johnny Depp’s Barnabas, who owns an 18th-century fishing empire on the coast of Maine which carries the family name. He’s rich and powerful until he falls for Bella Heathcote’s young beauty, thus breaking the heart and hardening the soul of Eva Green’s Angelique. She turns him into a vampire and buries him alive.

Two centuries later, in the early Seventies, workmen find the coffin and out he springs, apologetically killing most of them before returning to the now half-ruined Collinwood Manor, where Elizabeth the family matriarch (Michelle Pfeiffer) welcomes her odd visitor.

The family, though, is marginally odder than he, requiring Helena Bonham Carter’s live-in psychiatrist to keep things even vaguely on the level. Jonny Lee Miller is Elizabeth’s ne’er-do-well brother, Chloe Grace Moretz is her rebellious and revolting teenage daughter, and Gulliver McGrath is the 10-year-old son of Elizabeth’s brother who is deemed to be mad if not bad. It is also worth mentioning Jackie Earle Haley as the confused caretaker and Heathcote again as the boy’s nanny.

What a crew they are. Even Barnabas is regularly flummoxed as he sets about trying to restore the family fortunes. But, of course, he has Green’s witch to contend with and, even as he bites her neck, she is still intent on taking further revenge.

Colleen Atwood’s Seventies costumes are great, and the various hairdos are particularly striking, but it’s the CG fireworks, during which nearly everything seems eventually to go up in smoke, that you may like even better. The tone is not unlike that of The Munsters. It intends to be funny, even witty, rather than frightening, and that means everyone plays as straight as possible within the eccentric confines of their parts.

Depp is not a natural comedian but prompts smiles by being a rather peculiar version of himself. “Oh! Mephistopheles!” he says when he rises from his coffin to see a giant McDonald’s M — a joke which can be taken two ways.

Otherwise the screenplay doesn’t give him quite enough good lines with which to put his recalcitrant family in their place. Nor does the film have quite the visual sweep of Sleepy Hollow, despite Rick Heinrichs again providing the production design. It doesn’t, in fact, measure up to the best Burton. But it is at any rate better value than the disappointing Alice in Wonderland.

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