Official Synopsis
In the year 1750, Joshua and Naomi Collins, with young son Barnabas, set sail from England to start a new life in America, where they build a fishing empire in the coastal Maine town that comes to carry their name: Collinsport. Two decades pass and Barnabas (Johnny Depp) has the world at his feet. The master of Collinwood Manor, Barnabas is rich, powerful and an inveterate playboy…until he makes the grave mistake of falling in love with a beauty named Josette DuPres (Bella Heathcote) and breaking the heart of Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green). A witch in every sense of the word, Angelique dooms him to a fate worse than death—turning him into a vampire, and then burying him…alive.
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Nearly two centuries later, Barnabas is inadvertently freed from his tomb and emerges into the very changed world of 1972, a stranger in an even stranger time. Returning to Collinwood Manor, he finds that his once-grand estate has fallen into ruin, and the dysfunctional remnants of the Collins family have fared little better, each harboring their own dark secrets.
Family matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Michelle Pfeiffer) is the one person Barnabas entrusts with the truth of his identity. But his rather odd and anachronistic behavior immediately raises the suspicions of the live-in psychiatrist, Dr. Julia Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter), who has no idea what kind of problems she’s really digging up.
As Barnabas sets out to restore his family name to its former glory, one thing stands in his way: Collinsport’s leading denizen, who goes by the name Angie…and who bears a striking resemblance to a very old acquaintance of Barnabas Collins.
Also residing in Collinwood Manor are Elizabeth’s ne’er-do-well brother, Roger Collins, (Jonny Lee Miller); her rebellious teenage daughter Carolyn Stoddard (Chloë Grace Moretz); and Roger’s precocious 10-year-old son, David Collins (Gully McGrath). The longsuffering caretaker of Collinwood is Willie Loomis (Jackie Earle Haley), and new to the Collins’ employ is David’s nanny, Victoria Winters (Bella Heathcote), who is, mysteriously, the mirror image of Barnabas’ one true love, Josette.
Dark Shadows has moments of brilliance, most of it coming from the acting side. Johnny Depp’s Barnabas Collins is unforgiving and terrifying at times. Other times, his character’s dark humor is as intoxicating as a vampire with a warm cup of blood. To say that Johnny Depp’s performance is anything less than great would be an insult to the character he plays and his acting abilities.
The rest of the cast seems to buy into the environment set forth from director Tim Burton. Michelle Pfeiffer is a very strong Elizabeth Collins. A woman driven to protect her family and her family’s business. You have the beautiful and vicious Eva Green, as the antagonist Angelique Bouchard. Green brings a very seductive, devilish feel to the film, as a woman scorned by Barnabas’ lack of love for her. You also get the very sarcastic Chloë Grace Moretz playing Carolyn Stoddard, who is as rude and tough as she was in the movie Kick-Ass. Jackie Earle Haley, Helena Bonham Carter and Jonny Lee Miller round out the strong cast in Dark Shadows.
You really couldn’t ask for a better collection of people for this type of film. Regretfully, films have to have more than a strong cast to survive.
As most movies go, the story must come first above all else, even Johnny Depp. This is where the movie truly fails, as Seth Grahame-Smith’s screenplay is messy at best. It tries to take all of these slowly developed characters from the show and speed them up to fit plot points that weave in and out. For example, we don’t know much about Roger Collins in the film. We can’t really connect the dots with his fatherly duties when it comes to Gulliver McGrath’s David Collins. He isn’t in the film long enough to establish him as a central figure in David’s life, and you can’t really feel resentment towards him when he is revealed as a womanizer and a thief. When he is expelled from the family by Barnabas it really should be an emotional moment, but his character development wasn’t complete enough to make it so. Grahame-Smith did this to a lot of characters in the film, which hurt it severely and was the partial reason why it was messy.
The other reason for the disorganization of the film was trying to dig through the original show, pull some interesting storylines and somehow fit them into the 113 minute film. It’s nearly impossible to accomplish such a feat. What you get with Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows is this — too many plot points, not enough cohesion. For example, we have Barnabas falling in love with Bella Heathcote’s Josette DuPress, a shadow of Barnabas’ lost love. Intertwined with that is Barnabas’ hate for Eva Green’s Angelique Bouchard, who murdered his true love in the 1700s. That single plot point alone could have made up the film completely. Regretfully, the film kept developing and adding different storylines to the mix.
You get Helena Bonham Carter’s Dr. Julia Hoffman, who is the family psychiatrist helping with David’s issues. She wants to become immortal like Barnabas, and ends up cyphering his blood to do so. You also get Michelle Pfeiffer’s Elizabeth Collins, who is trying to keep the family together and revive the family fishing business. On top of that, you have Chloë Grace Moretz playing Carolyn Stoddard, trying to deal with a ‘major problem’ of her own, while also bringing comedy relief to the film. There are even more storylines and, well you can see where this is all going. There is simply too much packed into this film to make it a coherent 113 minute masterpiece.
Dark Shadows simply fails to capture the original soap opera because of its severe lack of understanding for ‘taking things slow’ in regards to the story. There are moments of fun, like when Barnabas hangs out with hippies around the campfire and then promptly ends up killing them in the most apologetic way, but for the most part you never find a solid track for this story to ride along on. It’s a true shame because Dark Shadows is a neat entity.
As for the Blu-ray portion of the review, the Blu-ray is exceptional. The movie looks gorgeous in HD, and it really is suited for this format. You get a lot of clean, crisp blues, reds, blacks, whites and purple with Dark Shadows. There is no color banding and the movie actually looks better in HD than it did in the theater. Granted, the 1970s color scheme really benefits from the HD upgrade, so that didn’t hurt. If you watch it for anything other reason, watch it because it’s gorgeous. It’s worth the ride for the HD.
The audio part of his release comes to you mastered in 5.1 DTS-HD. The aspect ratio of the film is 1.85:1.
Finally, as for features, here’s what you’re looking at with Dark Shadows:
– You get nine behind-the-film Focus Points, which inlude:
1. Becoming Barnabas
2. Welcome to Collinsport
3. A Melee of Monstrous Proportions
4. Angelique: A Witch Scorned
5. Reliving a Decade
6. Dark Shadowy Secret
7. The Collinses: Every Family has its Demons
8. Cooper Rocks Collinsport!
9. Vampires, Witches and Werewolves, OH MY!
– Deleted Scenes
The focus points are interesting, and add a bit more flavor to the film. You get to find out how things were done, what intentions were for particular moments and just small interesting facts about the making of Dark Shadows. They add to the flavor. The deleted scenes were actually quite good, as you get stuff that could have been (sometimes should have been) added to the film. For example, there is a wonderful deleted scene where cops pull over Barnabas and Jackie Earle Haley’s Willie Loomis. The cops tell them that they’ve found bodies mutilated, as if a bear has eaten them. Barnabas, who did the killing, responds in a snooty manner about how the cop was basically an untrained monkey in figuring out what killed the group of hippies. It’s hilarious and probably would have added a bit more depth to the moment. Anyway, the deleted scenes are well done.