I’ll say off the bat that I was primed to severely
dislike Dark Shadows, Tim Burton’s updating
of the 1960s daytime soap opera about a gothic manor in Maine with strange
supernatural occurrences. I have been less than enthusiastic – to put it diplomatically
– about most of Burton’s work in the last ten years. When I think back on his
career as a director, what I’ve enjoyed most are his films that are straight
comedies. He has a real knack for the bizarrely funny and whimsically macabre.
I think of Beetlejuice, Mars Attacks!, and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure as his most enjoyable features. Recent
films like Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Alice in Wonderland have been simply
odd, overblown and bloated. Then there was the matter of the advertising for Dark Shadows, which I thought made it
look like a 1970s kitsch piece featuring yet another in a long and increasingly
exhaustive series of offbeat Johnny Depp performances (his eighth in
collaboration with Burton). Imagine my immense surprise to find a lighthearted
homage to a TV series that Burton and Depp both claim to have loved as
children.
