One of Burton's best

Rating: 7/10 (1 May 2005)

Very entertaining modern fairy tale about a beautiful but not quite human young man--he looks like a glam rock star as drawn by Edward Gory--cursed with scissors (giant shears, rather) for hands, who wants to fit with ordinary people but ultimately can't. The suburban setting is almost as strange as Edward himself: Burton takes its familiar kitsch and exaggerates just enough so the banal becomes surreal, and charming. The most entertaining sequences are those with Edward interacting with the neighbourhood housewives who make a sort of pet of him when he shows just how skillful his hands can be by trimming first their topiary,then their hair into exotic shapes (is there some kind of erotic subtext going on here about the unfulfilled longings of desperate housewives? Edward is definitely sexier than any of their husbands, and one of the women, a Peg Bundy lookalike, does blatantly attempt to seduce him). But inevitably Edward accidentally harms someone with these same scissorhands, the neighbourhood quickly turns against him, and Edward ends up back in hiding at the old Hollywood style haunted castle whence he came.
The only element of the movie that doesn't really work is Winona Ryder who plays Edward's dream girl and is supposed to be magic. Ryder has been magic in other movies such as Beetlejuice and Great Balls of Fire, but she looks miscast here in a cheerleader's uniform and brassy blonde wig. (She is somewhat amusing in the opening scene where she's aged about by fifty years and reading a fairytale to her granddaughter).
All in all, worth adding to a permanent collection of DVDs.