The Addams Family meets The Munsters...

Rating: 6/10 (14 May 2012)

Knowing in advance that this one was a send-up wasn't warning enough, because it was Tim Burton at the wheel, with Johnny Depp riding shotgun. What could go wrong...? Well, what went wrong was the ****ing SCRIPT. This DARK SHADOWS (unlike the series that spawned it) is so badly written that it REEKS. So many opportunities were missed, even given the premise: it would've been far funnier to have the boy, David (played here by another of those bland child actors who don't really seem to belong on screen these days), be the one to experiment with mind-altering drugs or to play rock and roll records backward (giving Depp as Barny reason to believe that The Devil does indeed hold sway in the swingin' 70s); or to really explore pop psychology with Dr. Hoffman; or to have Barny in bell-bottoms- or dressed like Superfly after taking in a "shadow play"; or have Barny cringing behind a couch while watching the original broadcast of Dan Curtis's teleclassic, THE NIGHTSTALKER; or to have Barny emerge at film's end from his coffin prison into the early 21st century... The possibilities are endless, but whoever wrote this one apparently didn't really think things through- proof enough of that being that any send-up of DARK SHADOWS would absolutely HAVE to hark back to THE MUNSTERS and THE ADDAMS FAMILY. Not that it's ALL bad: Depp is still most adept at creating a likable character, even given the lackluster nature of the material he's been given, and the movie looks gorgeous. The music never settles in long enough to establish any real mood, however, and the climactic pyrotechnics are just so much sturm und drang, signifying nothing. Subtle, it ain't.