"DisapPOINTed!" - Otto

Rating: 2/10 (19 April 2013)

One of the reasons that "Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein" and "Young Frankenstein" are perfect horror comedies is because they each have a consistent tone. "Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein" plays as both a standard Abbott & Costello comedy and a standard Universal horror film. Bud & Lou play for laughs and the monsters play it straight. The only exception is when Frankenstein's Monster recoils in horror when seeing Costello for the first time. "Young Frankenstein" examines all the clichés of old "Frankenstein" movies, but the characters are always deadly serious.
On the other hand, I've been listening to a lot of old time radio comedy shows featuring horror stars like Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre. Some are really good ("Bob Hope", "Abbott & Costello"), but most of them ("Dinah Shore", "Command Performance") are painful, because they are written by hacks with no love for the genre, who trot out the same references and puns every time. They'd be unbearable if it wasn't for the gravitas brought by the stars – Peter Lorre, in particular, could make any line funny.
"Dark Shadows" plays as if a team of writers from the "Dinah Shore Show" were assigned to write a straight horror movie and couldn't resist the impulse to Get a Few Boffos! This could have been *such* a good movie, and it's just crap. It just has no idea what kind of film it wants to be, and the mix it tries for just doesn't mix. Barnabas Collins emerges from his coffin after 196 years and he's *really thirsty*, killing eleven construction workers luckless enough to have dug up his grave. Then he does a lame gag with a McDonald's sign. He brushes his teeth while looking into a mirror which doesn't reflect him. He sleeps hanging upside down like a bat.
There are some chilling moments, as when Barnabas sadly announces to a group of hippies with whom he has been pleasantly (if inanely) conversing, that he will now have to kill all of them. Which he does. It wants to be a straight horror film. It wants to be a fish-out-of-water comedy. And it has NO clue how to put the two together.
Burton also steals the brilliant sex-so-hot-it-trashes-the-bedroom scene from "The Tall Guy", where Jeff Goldblum and Emma Thompson hilariously wrecked an entire room – without the benefit of harnesses and stunt people. It's not funny here.
Johnny Depp does what he can with the material. For this picture, rather than channeling Michael Jackson, he's 100% doing Richard Burton as a vampire.
Eva Green is really good as Angelique, though unlike Lara Parker, her eyes are not her most prominent features.
Jackie Earle Haley is good as Willie Loomis, totally played for laughs rather than as John Karlen's angsty, guilt-ridden dweeb.
I love Helena Bonham Carter in most things, and here she's a redhead, so you're not going to catch me saying she's being anything less than magnificent. I started to visualize Grayson Hall (the original Dr. Hoffman) going as far with Jonathan Frid as Bonham Carter goes with Depp, but my inner eyeballs started burning.
Everybody else was OK. Eh.
Original series stars Jonathan Frid, Kathryn Leigh Scott, Lara Parker and David Selby appear in the ball sequence – for four seconds.
I'm a huge fan of the original series. I had high hopes because Tim Burton and Johnny Depp kept loudly proclaiming that THEY were fans of the original series. As a straight vampire film with great characters and solid acting, this is a bust. As an episode of "The Birds-Eye Open House with Dinah Shore", it's serviceable. Not a bomb, but incredibly disappointing and not worth seeing.