Sometimes you can still catch me dancing in it.

Rating: 8/10 (24 July 2016)

A reclusive inventory is in the business of automatic cookie making machines. How very nice and sweet, if the machine didn't look like a devilish contraption with all sorts of hissing and blades and dangling arms. Then he has the idea to build a living machine that will serve as his son, as an answer to his loneliness. For some reason or another, he decides to fasten ten long scissor blades instead of fingers, and just as he is about to attach human hands, he drops dead right on the spot. How very twisted, and how very Burton.
The decrepit mansion that Edward resides in recalls all the Gothic horror of the past, with its arches and curling stairwells and ominous statues. This doesn't trouble Peg Boogs at all. Dianne Weist is such a tremendous actress; she carries an endless motherly quality about her, with her creased smile and squinted eyes, and even when she is angry she is not really angry, but huffs and puffs and tries to reconsider. Here she considers all the ominous signs of the abandoned mansion on top of the hill, sticking out like a sore thumb in the barbie house neighbourhood, and approaches it anyway. She titters as she prances up the spiny, dusty stairway: "I'm your local Avon representative!" Burton shows awareness of the classic monster stories (Frankenstein, Beauty and the Beast). He clearly sets Peg up us the unwitting victim, crawling into the trap of the horror. So it is a pleasant surprise when Peg starts recommending beauty products to cover up his scars, and then decides to up and take him home with her. What a ticklishly funny image; the ghostly white, oversized Edward hunched in the front seat, and the ever-smiling Peg driving along as if she was just picking up a friend.
The town is a cute little caricature, with a chic colour scheme full of lime greens, bright pinks, baby blues, and so on, more garish and lurid as time goes on. Even the cars are colour-coded, and when they pull out of their driveway, they do so in sync with each other, and drive off to work in a conga line. So Edward's freakish appearance seems the complete antithesis of such a bright neighbourhood, but in reality he fits right in. The women gossip and fawn over his ability to garden and style their hair, and force feed him their food like a baby, and the men slap him on the back and bust his balls. Bill encourages him to charge for his services, and even to open his own business, so it is no surprise that the freak is normalised as soon as he finds a use for his bizarre tools.
Depp is a cartoon character come to life. His hair sticks out in a messy manner of different directions as if he is being constantly electrified, and when his hands whir and get to work, we get the same type of cartoonish animation, with bits of hair and bush spitting out and flying everywhere until he reveals his masterpiece. The performance is a strongly physical one; what could be said in a few whispered words, Depp prefers to show in his body language. Edward is in a permanently hunched state, his gangly scissorhands dangling down from his already long limbs, giving him the appearance of a grotesque monster. But it is one of those 'it's more scared of you' situations; Depp's wide, frightened eyes betraying an innocence that clashes with his appearance, and when he stalks out of Kim's room after both frightening each other, the mechanical awkwardness in his strides and the way he holds his hands is first endearing, then scary.
It is all wrapped up in a somewhat convincing love story. It is the beauty and the beast finding unlikely love, except in this instance the beauty has an arrogant, thuggish boyfriend that defies belief that anyone could fall for him. He is the designated baddie, the fall guy (literally), and therefore only slightly imagined and fleshed out. For the viewer it is only a matter of time before Kim and Jim become Kim and Edward. But even the latter only lasts for a brief moment, with Kim making the sacrifice for the sake of Edward's safety. The film is framed by a lovely narrative device plucked straight from a children's fairytale. You can almost hear the little boy tuckered up in his sheets, asking "Granny, where does snow come from?"