Dark Shadows, bad dialogues

Rating: 6/10 (15 December 2012)

Dark Shadows is visually a great Tim Burton movie, but the script is totally insufficient. It's based on the eponymous late-1960ies soap opera, which is still one of the longest TV series (in terms of episodes) in history. I didn't know about the series, and it's hard to gauge how many out of the 2012 audience have it on their radar -- very few will have actually seen it. Director Tim Burton is apparently a huge fan of the series, which may have lead to him getting carried away. Or maybe condensing 1125 episodes into a 90 minutes feature film is an impossible feat to begin with. What Burton came up with is the story of a 200 year old vampire resurfacing in the colourful early 1970ies (roughly the era when the run of the original series ended), which is mainly characterised by macramé, troll dolls and Alice Cooper. And a few stoner hippies. Unlike the original series, the 2012 feature film is a comedy, and the culture clash between the ancient vampire and his modern-age family and surroundings could have been a functional plot motor, but unfortunately it falls completely flat because the script -- and especially the dialogues -- sucks. Hard to fathom in a movie that cost US$ 150 million. The result is a movie that is so disappointing that I can't even recommend it for home viewing.