A Modern Classic

Rating: 10/10 (3 December 2007)

~ Once upon a time there was a man who had scissors for hands ...
He lived in a castle on a hill that looked down upon a small suburban town. An elderly inventor (Vincent Price) created the man, giving him all the body parts required of a human except hands, for the inventor died before he could finish his creation ...
Edward Scissorhands (Johnny Depp) lived alone in the castle for many years until one day someone raps hard at the door and in walks the local Avon Lady, Peg (Dianne Wiest). Disheartened by the way Edward is living, she invites him to leave the damp and dismal castle and live with her family back in colorful suburbia ...
Here he settles in and befriends Peg's husband, Bill (Alan Arkin) and their son, Kevin. He quickly falls in love with their daughter, Kim (Winona Ryder)and astounds the neighborhood with his 'chopping talents' that range from topiary to haircutting. But it soon becomes obvious that his scissor-hands are deadly sharp ...
Throughout the film Edward is transformed from freak to celebrity and inevitably back to freak once more, as the townspeople - who are initially enchanted by his oddball talents - soon tire of him. Once trouble rears its ugly head - mainly in the shape of Kim's jealous boyfriend, Jim (Anthony Michael Hall) - Edward is rendered an outcast once more ...
The final confrontation aptly takes place one snowy Christmas Eve, a nice touch for this modern-day fairytale ~ What Tim Burton has created here is a modern-day Frankenstein, loved by a few but shunned by an angry mob, who inevitably fear and hate him. Like Mary Shelley's creation, Edward is the Other, an outsider who knows little about life in the real world and finds it equally hard to adapt to his new life and surroundings; he is extremely naive and vulnerable, imaginative yet misunderstood like many of the characters in Tim Burton's films (see Ed Wood).
For the film's setting, Burton offers two strikingly different locations - a stereotypical 1980s suburban village and a Gothic castle - which works perfectly when comparing the uninspiring and viciously petty suburbanites to the lonely gentle spirit that is Edward.
Matthew J Lee-Williams, Review.