This film tried to be too many things and failed.

Rating: 3/10 (14 May 2012)

I had only a passing acquaintance with the original series but had high expectations of the film as i am generally a fan of Tim Burton. I loved the setting's Gothic darkness peppered with the kitsch of the 1970's, but beyond that the film was a disappointment. Not funny enough to be a parody and not serious enough to be an homage, this movie wasted the talents of its cast.
Burton didn't seem to know who his audience was, and as such, story elements and characters were introduced helter skelter without any sense of how they fit into the film or would play out in the end. For example, David Collins, a boy who is supposed to be so highly disturbed by his relationship with his dead mother's ghost that a full time psychologist and a string of nannies have been employed by the family to keep him under control, is completely manageable and relatively polite. The audience never sees him acting oddly upon her instructions or even conversing with the dead relative, much less showing any signs of being disturbed. Meanwhile, his cousin appears to have some anger issues, and the audience has no idea why until the last ten minutes of the movie when it's revealed out of nowhere that she had been turned into a werewolf as an infant. Despite the bizarre timing of this revelation, it has no bearing on the outcome of the story at all. Instead, "disturbed" David's ghostly mother, a character whom we know nothing about and have never seen until the climax of the film, ultimately brings about the downfall of the antagonist.
I had the impression that much of the story was left on the cutting room floor, which may be the result of trying to fit a five-year-long soap opera into a two-hour movie. The result was a morass of flat, unsympathetic characters and loose strings that left me with little desire to learn where they led.
The film had moments of humor mostly tied to the incongruity of the two time periods, the most noteworthy of which was the use of the clever use of 70's music tracks, but this was not nearly enough to make up for the film's flaws. Overall, it felt like I was being told a joke by someone who doesn't know how to tell a joke.