Dark Shadows

Rating: Null/10 (20 September 2003)

What a huge disappointment! This film had so much potential, yet squandered every bit of it. The movie, instead of being a spine-tingling horror-adventure ride, is instead a ponderous, painful machine that grinds down everything in its wake, including the viewer. Everything about the movie is assaultive, including the overbearing sound-design. This is one of those movies where one of the actors scratching his ass sounds like a nuclear bomb going off. Even the production design, on which clearly millions has been lavished, misfires. Instead of being evocative and powerful, the sets wind up looking like relics from some 80s Bauhaus video. I kept expecting Peter Murphy to show up and start singing.

The film has no sense of rhythm, pacing or tone, and is utterly clueless about how to build and sustain suspense. The director thinks you create suspense by having lots of people firing lots and lots of bullets at each other all the time. The film begins at a fever pitch, and because of this has nowhere to go. All the characters are pumped up on adrenaline all the time, all they do is scream at each other all the time or hysterically fire bullets at each other. It's totally boring after five minutes. And the film inadvertently makes both groups seem pretty dumb. I mean here you have to societies of immortals, with limitless time and money on their hands, with the wisdom of the ages theirs to command, and they can only think to fight each other in the most primitive way imaginable. I would expect more from such creatures. Blade's depiction of vampires was superior in every respect.
There is something of a plot which every once in a while peeks through the mindless carnage, but no one has cared enough about it to make it intelligible. There are major continuity gaps that are surprising in such a large production. For example, the film makes no attempt to define where the action is taking place. There is no sense of place at all. Most of the actors speak with British accents. The physical setting is clearly Budapest (at least that's what I gather from all the signs in Hungarian). Yet one of the main characters works at a hospital where everyone is American. OK, so what is going on here? The movie never bothers to explain. It has to hurry to the next scene of people screaming and shooting at each other in low-light situations.
But the biggest problem with the movie is that its makers never seemed to understand the central problem they would have to overcome in realizing the film's premise. Vampires and Werewolves become scary and ghoulish when they are fighting humans, because, in relation to them, they are fundamentally other, fundamentally different. This is why vampire and werewolf movies are so popular. Yet when vampires and werewolves fight each other, they cancel out each other's weirdness, the otherness and terror of each nullifies the otherness and terror of other. Which is why, even though we are looking at vampires fighting werewolves, they primarily fight one another with human weapons, in a human way: guns and guns and more guns. There is nothing supernatural or horrific about how they relate to each other at all. This makes the premise of the movie utterly mundane and without interest. What is the point of having supernatural creatures battle each other, if they just wind up looking like human gangs fighing? No point at all. Which is my point.
Clearly there will be a sequel. I hope they get someone on board who understands the kind of movie they are trying to make.