Maybe Not Slavishly Faithful - But Evocative of a Childhood with Monsters.

Rating: 8/10 (13 May 2012)

'Dark Shadows' is a TV show I was never familiar with apart from when Tim Burton and John Waters name checked the 1960s American Gothic soap opera in their 1989 UK promotion of 'Beetlejuice' and 'Cry Baby' respectively. So, to me if no-one else, Burton seemed a natural to bring a condensed homage to the show to the big screen.
Though having never seen the source material, I enjoyed Burton and Depp's 'Dark Shadows' as it evoked a childhood, much like my own, spent as an outsider even the Dungeons and Dragons crowd wouldn't have, let alone the football team - why throw a dice or obey a DM to become a monster when you could drape a sheet over yourself, bare your top set of teeth at bemused girls in the playground and be Christopher Lee, dive about a local forest on a BMX like Skywalker on a speeder bike or carry a plastic gun through a car park as if I was Shaft... OK maybe my parents should not have shown me a videotape of 'Shaft' at age 7.
What 'Dark Shadows' central performance, Johnny Depp as Barnabus Collins, was a refined version of, was the remotely talented kid channelling a vampire in play. Eva Green's all powerful witch Angelique had something of the same quality and so a brilliantly staged, professional version of kids at play was infectiously delivered on screen.
This sense of play from children of the nineteen seventies where the age of tweens truly took hold has been in other films. This was the personal, deep way films like 'Where the Wild Things Are' and 'The Muppets (2011)' were interpreted for the cinema. This is professional fan fiction writ large and with its heart on its sleeve. Depp may have been the very seven year old who aped Jonathan Frid's original Barnabus Collins while Burton may have been formed by the era of inventive exploitation movies and solid auteurs of horror. Kubrick's 'The Shining' is inferred at points in the opening exterior and intermediate interiors of the film while Donner's 'The Omen', Argento's 'Suspiria' and even 'The Godfather' are woven into the film's Proustian depiction of seventies life in a way, for example, JJ Abrams never quite recaptured the eighties in 'Super 8'. The music of the time doesn't just pervade the soundtrack - one representation of a werewolf is straight out of 'Ozzy Osbourne's 'Bark At the Moon' cover while a CGI-makeover-ed Alice Cooper struts iconically in one party scene and all but steals the show.
The soap operatics insist that character arcs from five series of a late sixties, early seventies TV show are condensed into one film and this is fairly well handled. I bow to the opinion of disappointed fans as I would never want, say, a big screen 'the Prisoner' to cram the whole slow-burn plot into one film. However the summoning of 'Dallas' and not a little Hammer (there was after all a 'Dracula: AD 1972')is present.
Overall a film to sate original fans of vampires, ghouls, witches and wolf-men who collected garish art cards and abandoned Aurora kits to swamps of glue. 'Twilight' fans can keep their anaemic teenage monsters.