My boss - yes I mean the total ultimate trekkie for those of you who read my Horrible Bosses review - use to tell me a lot about the TV show. How while it was a over dramatic soap opera, it became awesome the moment they put Barnabas Collins in the show. I tried to watch it a little myself...didn't get far. By that I mean I couldn't watch the show at all without playing a video game or something to keep myself amused while watching it. But now we have come to the actual film made by Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. So let's take a look at how that worked out.
Plot: in 1760, Barnabas Collins was a wealthy playboy to a fishing business who broke the heart of a servant who was a witch named Angelique. For revenge, she cast a spell on Barnabas' lover Josette making her jump off a cliff and then turns Barnabas into a vampire. She then reveals to the townspeople that he's a vampire and they lock him up in a coffin and bury him. He breaks out of his coffin later to the year 1972 where Angelique has made a fishing business that is rivaling the Collins' business. So Barnabas convinces the matriarch of the current generation of the Collins family that he is a vampire and to allow him to bring the Collins family back to their former glory.
This movie is mixed. They have there little bit of humor, some of the ideas they put at is awesome, and while I didn't expect much with the story, there were a couple of things that I didn't expect that were nice touches. But, the humor isn't spectacular, and while some of the unexpected stuff from the story was nice, to me they were hardly structured well. My main examples *WARNING SPOILERS* would firstly be that for a horror comedy that aims at family being the best thing in the world (which was cheesy, I mean seriously) , I don't think they gave us the family that Barnabas was fighting for very well. I especially mean how David's dad left and never came back. Now bear in mind that I barely touched the show, but I seriously doubt that fans were okay with him being that way. Not to mention I think him coming back would've been nicer touch to the whole family thing. Actually, they don't make the family too much of a priority. Oh sure it's because of family, Barnabas fights on against Angelique, but during the very end it's about the romance between him and Victoria, then the little twist over Dr. Hoffman, and then that's it. I just think that if they were making the whole deal about family so important, you'd think they'd end on something that has to do with it. You know, make it the final word. The second thing is the romance between Barnabas and Victoria. I think the way they started it was way to quick. I mean after Barnabas moves in, they have the moment where they read Love Story and then later in the film, he's asking Carolyn about woman in this current age. In fact, all the dialogue they have is just a brief talk about her past and then say that she has always known him and boom, there's your romantic moment that's actually built in just one scene after hardly doing anything outside of reading throughout the movie so far. I just thought it was poorly developed with that said. and finally, how there were parts in the movie that was just interesting but they didn't go too much on. My main example is Carolyn turning out to be a werewolf. I mean in the eyes of certain film geeks like me, we are talking about Hit-Girl being a werewolf...that's awesome. the problem is, she gets her butt kicked a little easily which is part of the other part of the problem which is that her moment as a werewolf is really short. It was just a really cool twist and I just wished we had more! really both that and the deal with the romance in this film leads to the all around problem that they only develop a little on a lot of things, and then just squish them together to be temporarily introduced, then go back to Barnabas' battle against Angelique. This somewhat falls in line to what I said about Bridesmaids. They hardly worked on the other characters, and in the end, it was more about the main character, Annie than all the other ones that we were interested in. Now it's not quite as bad in Dark Shadows because these characters are more developed and have an actual part in the climax, but at the end of it, it's just all about Barnabas just like it was all about Annie in Bridesmaids. Plus, we're getting these characters on a less than two hour long movie. So maybe there was no way they could've given us more than they did for all of these characters no matter how interesting they are. If that's the case, then maybe they should've made this longer or something because this didn't really do the job to give us these characters from fan and non-fans alike. *END OF SPOILERS* Now when it comes to the fact that they've taken a Gothic soap opera into a horror comedy, I don't think it really worked out that well. I mean I agree that maybe they needed to make it a little different from the show since the show was not exactly LOST and stuff like that. Heck, this movie probably works better for some people since we are given a Dark Shadows story in less than two hours rather then one that's 1,225 episodes long. But on a whole, it's very likely that they make it so off from the show that it'll work for very few fans. I mean when my boss saw the trailer for the film all he said was that it was a forsaken shame.
Acting/Characters:
Johnny Depp/Barnabas Collins: There was a critic who said, "How is it possible that a man who just a few years ago stood as one of our most exciting and unconventional actors has now become one of the most predictable?" -Matt Burnson. And I regrettably have to agree. Depp's performance was very predictable. In terms of how he speaks, or tries to be funny or dramatic, it looks like it's been done enough times already that we got the idea long before he was buried. What happened to all the different voices or the unpredictability and all that? This particularity hurts in terms of being Barnabas Collins. We mostly have Johnny Depp being Johnny Depp but we probably don't get enough of him as Barnabas the vampire. Sure he kills a few people but I didn't find those moments as serious as they could've been for something horror related. Because we have him killing people, which is confronted with the Johnny Depp who says stuff like, "I'm terrible sorry, but I'm quite thirsty."
Michelle Pfeiffer/Elizabeth Collins Stoddard: She was nice. The one thing I did like was how she was...well a determined matriarch. Because I didn't think she's be anything like that after seeing the trailers so it was nice to see that she was.
Gulliver McGrath/David Collins: This was another character I thought they should've developed on more. David was being viewed as this mysterious kid who thinks there's ghosts after his mother's death. They show that, but they don't go too far with it. they show it on a couple of scenes and then it's on to Barnabas' thing.
Music: If you like music from the 70's whether it's Alice Cooper or not, then you should have no problem with the songs in this film. As for the score, I didn't notice too much to have much of an opinion.
Editing: I thought it was nice.
And that's my review for Dark Shadows. It's a little okay, but there's so many things wrong with it that it really doesn't work too well with developing a lot of the stuff that's interesting or the characters you might like.
And if you want to see my video review. here's my links for both parts for them.
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9Ygiqszrk4&list=PL29674ED22E57C355&index=3&feature=plpp_video
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orKCKl4c3hc&feature=relmfu
No comments:
Post a Comment