Cute Trifle

Rating: 7/10 (5 November 2012)

I was a kid when Dark Shadows started, and it was never on my radar. When I heard about it later I was very curious, and when it finally was syndicated on TV I watched a couple of episodes and found it painfully tedious. A 70s daytime soap with vampires is still a 70s daytime soap.
The movie version is decidedly faster paced, aiming for campy, silly comedy and cute special effects. While it's not as fun as Burton's Ed Wood nor as deep as his Big Fish, it is a generally amusing burlesque of 70s television.
I felt the last part of the movie was the weakest. Dark Shadows owes its success to not taking itself seriously, but towards the end, as the various dramatic threads come awkwardly together, the movie tries to both give viewers some flashy special effects and pull some emotion out of them, and it just doesn't work, both because it's not in keeping with the rest of the film and because the movie doesn't try hard enough to create that emotion.
But overall I thought this was quite fun.