Dark Shadows (2012) - Tim Burton

Dark Shadows, the latest Tim Burton/Johnny Depp endeavor tells the story of Barnabas, a vampire who has just been freed in the early 1970s, after spending 200 years underground.  Freed and in a time in which he knows very little, Barnabas returns to his ancestral home.  As he lives there, we come to realize that his descendants have issues of their own.   Let me just start off by saying that I have never seen the show and I can only imagine it is far more interesting than this film.   The whole fish out of water shtick which the film uses is indeed surprisingly charming and engaging early on, but I found that it wears its welcome out extremely fast.   What is left is a really uninspired film that's just dull and uninteresting.  I have not been a fan of Burton for years and this film re-affirms how boring and generic his aesthetic has become.  The one thing that I can credit Burton with is the follow-thru in remembering that Barnabas is a creature from the horror genre.  There are two sequences where Depp's character murders a group of people, which are well-directed and pretty frightening.  I also enjoyed the Burton homage to T2 with Pfeiffer doing her best impression of Linda Hamilton but this is just lazy storytelling, particularly with all the reveals at the very end.

4.0/10

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