Some hits, many misses - all in all, a bit better than expected

Rating: 5/10 (28 November 2012)

At least it sports the creepy/soapy patina of a Dan Curtis production.
I found myself pleasantly surprised at how I enjoyed the first fifteen minutes or so. I don't mind the mixing and matching of original DS elements, like rolling the Maggie Evans and Victoria Winters characters into one (the original show made little distinction between the two).
The scene of Miss Winters riding a train into Collinsport, coasting through the scenic multicolored forests and seafaring coastline where I grew up and set to the Moody Blues' "Nights in White Satin" even made me a bit emotional. Virtually every molecule of the movie screen at that moment made me yearn for and mourn my own long-lost seventies innocence and sense of limitless wonder.
I didn't mind the revisionary remix of Barnabas' vampiric origin story. No spoiler alert: suffice to say, he still screwed a witch, and the witch screwed him and his entire family in return.
I can even accept Barnabas being infatuated with, and quoting from, the book Love Story, just one of the "Hey, look, it's the SEVENTIES" nails hammered into the cinematic coffin every few minutes. Barney was always a hopeless romantic, rendering him eternally (as the old "Marilyn Ross" Dark Shadows novels' go-to adjective used to sigh) "melancholy." I can NOT, however, reconcile myself to a Barnabas who, on first sight of a McDonalds sign, mere moments after his resurrection from a 197-year interment, assumes the giant 'M' stands for the devil Mephistopheles.
Depp's Barnabas is so utterly humorless that such grimace-inducing guffaws are rendered even more out-of-step with the rest of the movie than the centuries-old vampire is with the unfamiliar era in which he finds himself. And the mocking juxtapositions just keep coming: jokes about being stoned (by rocks), or how the Collins have such big balls (parties, not 'nads, a gag AC/DC ran into the ground 30-plus years ago), or how a TV screen featuring the Carpenters performing must be possessed by a tiny songstress (and that's not even the only Carpenters joke).
However. Jettison the recurring gags (the worst of them featuring Barnabas trying to find a comfortable place to sleep, from inside wall cabinets to an empty refrigerator box emptied of Styrofoam peanuts). Also ignore the frequent musical dips into the very worst of the '70s A.M. radio well. Ditch and ignore such foo-hah-hah, and what do you think remains? A movie that isn't all that bad.
For instance, the unkillable four-headed beast that is Burton/Depp/Bonham/Elfman gets the music exactly RIGHT several times, most notably the entire time that Alice Cooper is hanging out at Collinwood.
Also not bad: Collinwood. Maybe even BETTER than the TV show incarnation, which always looked comically tiny and claustrophobic on the inside, especially for a supposedly sprawling mansion. Certainly better than the Collinwood of the 1971 Night of Dark Shadows movie. The new movie mansion's transformation from cobweb-heavy secret passageway-riddled goth dump to shining party pad practically qualifies the old homestead as an uncredited character.
Ditto the way nearby Widow's Hill draws the rocky waves beneath it into the movie so often, in so many ways, that the foreboding and deadly nexus of ocean and jagged stone also becomes an indelible presence in the film, bringing it into the storyline in an all-encompassing way the original TV show never really pulled off past its iconic opening credits sequence.
As for the actors portraying our old DS friends and fiends, it takes a bit of re-thought to accept demure old family matriarch Elizabeth as a meaner, leaner, bitchier and better dressed version of Al Pacino's squeeze in Scarface (both played by Michelle Pfeiffer).
But lazy old Thurston Howell-wannabe Roger Collins maintains his indolence and yellow streak. The dude who played Rorschach in Watchmen plays Barnabas' lackey Willie Loomis. Dude's come a long way since bicycling thru Breaking Away.
The girl superhero from Kick-Ass, Chloe Moretz, well plays entitlement-rich (if penny poor) Carolyn Collins, and even frequent Burton/Depp co-conspirator Helena Bonham Carter as Dr. Julia Hoffman holds a similar enough line to her vintage counterpart to make me feel I know who at least some of these darkly tinted doppelangers are supposed to be.
Even young master David Collins remains the handy and bland narrative device that he always was.
The only fly in the casting ointment was the skull-faced pretender was played the witch Angelique. Sure, Lara Parker, and even Lysette Anthony, are hard acts to follow, but I never once believed that our latterday Angelique could ever have enthralled one as lionhearted as Barnabas Collins. In the past OR in 1972.
As for her witchiness, Angelique Version 3.0 is completely outclassed and outdone even by, say, Billie Burke and Mama Cass (what child of the '70s like me could resist a double-barrel pipeload of HR Pufnstuf reference here?).
I'll parcel out some praise for the dialogue. Particularly Barnabas'. Other than a couple of gag lines, he speaks the exact words that someone who's been wading in Barnabas-quotes for 40-plus years would expect and even hope him to speak. And, against all expectation and odds, Johnny Depp reads them in a way that won me over. Even/especially the last ten minutes or so.
There's probably at least a half hour that I would have jettisoned, to keep the feel and look more consistent with the terrific opening sequences. There are no real chuckles in seeing a vampire brush his fangs in a mirror which doesn't reflect him, and bits like that are more torn from Mad Magazine than from the Dan Curtis productions.
But the REST of the movie, the parts not aiming for the juvenile "humor in a jugular vein" (to again borrow from Mad), well, it was indeed like a visit with at least the offspring of our old Collinsport crew, if not with the original characters that fanatical devotees like me know and love so well.