Fridae

Most of the time when you see a Tim Burton film, you know what you're up for: affectionate homages to 30s horror and 50s B-films, lovable monster protagonists that do harm despite their best intentions, and digs at the conformist banal tendencies of American pop culture.

With Dark Shadows, Burton ironically starts off on an attempt at the usual footings only to fall into the very sort of conformist tendencies his films tend to lampoon. The film is based on a 1970s soap opera of the same name, known for mixing horror elements and the daytime drama, and unseen by me. That the source material for this movie is that most banal of American entertainments: the soap opera, should be an irony not easily lost.

Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) began life as a wealthy mortal man and the heir to the Collins clan, but a curse from witch Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green) turned him into a vampire and caused his lover Josette (Bella Heathcote) to commit suicide. Bouchard, a woman who must possess what she desires and will destroy what she cannot possess, soon rises to become a community leader in the town of Collinsport, ME as wealthy and influential as Barnabas, and leads a 'vampire hunt' against Collins that results in him being buried alive in a coffin.

Nearly two centuries later, Maggie 'Victoria' Evans (Heathcote again) applies for the job of governess at the Collins household, now fallen into disrepair and their reputation as seafood magnates a fraction of what it once was, and is welcomed by matriarch Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer), presiding over a dysfunctional household including no good brother Roger (Jonny Lee Miller), eccentric daughter Carolyn (Chloe Moretz), timid son David (Gulliver McGrath) and loony psychiatrist Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter). It's now the 70s, the era of the counterculture, the Vietnam War and the Carpenters. Victoria's arrival happens to coincide with a road excavation that releases Barnabas from his coffin, and Barnabas reenters the modern world to puncture necks, take names and reinvigorate his family's fallen fortune, which is threatened by the near-immortal Bouchard, who now owns rival canning company Angel Bay Seafood.

The paint-by-numbers script by Seth Grahame-Smith, working from a story by Smith and August, for the greater part consists of showing Barnabas being eccentric and doing all manner of fish-out-of-water jokes, pop culture references and even a couple lame puns. This of course is a setup for the contrasting of his eccentricities with the strange twilight of 70s pop culture, from Love Story to Alice Cooper (in a cameo playing himself, proving that the real way for immortality in this world is through some good ol' rock and roll) and The Carpenters. Yes Mr Burton, American pop culture is one big freak sideshow, we get it. Plot points are raised and hastily answered, and a few hasty last minute plot twists fail to resuscitate what is for the most part a pretty predictable affair. Burton's usual visual flair and imagination seems to be operating on a slumming mode here, the set decoration feels mundane and uninteresting by his standards, and a scene sure to soon serve as a haunted house ride at some theme park descends to the level of banal cacophony last seen in Jan De Bont's much-maligned The Haunting.

Dark Shadows is probably the worst Burton film with a Depp lead yet, with a staid script and by-the-numbers execution, this is firmly a moneymaker and not much more.