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Movie Review: Dark Shadows
KFGO's Mike McFeely producer, Dan "Pinto" Gunderson reviews the summer movie Dark Shadows starring Johnny Depp.
Along with going to The Avengers this past weekend, I also took in the movie Dark Shadows, which opened on May 11. The movie’s biggest draws are lead actor Johnny Depp and director Tim Burton.
The movie is about the Collins’ family, mainly their son Barnabas, who is played by Johnny Depp that moves from England to America in 1760. The Collins quickly build a very lucrative shipping business in Collinsport, Maine. Along with the business, they build a mansion for their family to live in.
While Barnabas is a much sought after young man, he spurns the love of one girl to pursue the love of another. The women he spurns, Angelique Bouchard, who is played by Eva Green, ends up to be a witch.
She is so hurt by him that she kills his parents, sends the love of his life to her demise and curses him to live the rest of his life as a vampire. He is captured and locked up by the locals and spends the next two centuries buried before being dug up by a group of construction workers. He finds out that 1972 is much different from 1760.
This movie is based on a soap opera from the 1960’s by the same name.
What I Liked:
The way Burton portrays the colors in this movie is magnificent. One of the characters, Dr. Julia Hoffman, who is played by Helena Bonham Carter, has the vibrant orange hair that shines brightly on the big screen. Barnabas Collins’ pale skin is ghostly white and reflects that of a chalk in color.
That is one thing Burton has always done well is take a dream and put it on screen so realistically that you might believe he saw something similar in real life. He can make a fantasy world come to life and do it in a myriad of ways. In this instance, he takes the colors and contrasts them so perfectly against each other that they stand out.
What I Didn’t Like:
The storyline was awful. The characters are poorly developed and the relationships between each one is much worse. Some of them take turns that don’t even make sense in the context of the story, much like Dr. Hoffman acting on feelings she has for Barnabas, which comes out of left field.
Johnny Depp’s character is suppose to be madly in love with Victoria Winters, played by Bella Heathcote, yet in the entire movie you only see a handful of scenes where you see these two interact. Other characters will comment on Barnabas’ love for Winters but you never buy it.
It seemed the script was put together with a bunch of ideas of where the story could go that were never fully developed. All the sudden, the writers had this mess, a deadline and nowhere to go with the script. What ended up was mass confusion and a poorly written movie.
F = Forget It!
I wouldn’t even bother waiting to get this one on DVD. Storyline is bad, most of the jokes are bad and in the end you can’t believe you wasted your time watching this.
Burton rarely misses, but this on this one he came up empty. Not much about this movie interested me and I am predicting a major drop in the box office numbers after the movie’s opening weekend.
Next up: Battleship
