Dark Shadows (2012) Review
At the risk of sidetracking a bit this movie, along with the director, was the first thing that came into my mind when I came across an idea I struggled with once. This being that when you create a behemoth of a project at the expense of “shooting for the moon/surpassing your limits/stepping out of your comfort zone” you risk two things. One, you favor quantity over quality (if not just style over substance) and come out with a rushed, unpolished product. Two, your ambition becomes something you bit on more than you could chew and you end up scrapping it, if not leaving this idea, in development hell. When Mr. Burton got the latter he ended up with a film like “The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened?”, which is an entirely different story but perfectly encapsulates my point (that is also worth checking out). When he got the former he got a mess like Dark Shadows. I admit I’ve never heard of the original 60s/70s show this is based on, but from what I could gather, Mr. Burton aimed mostly to recapture that same dark edge he harnessed with Sleepy Hollows and Sweeney Todd but with a lower rating. The problem, however, is that not only did Sweeney Todd have the right amount of substance by comparison yet Mr. Burton had already prepared himself for the style he was aiming towards thanks to musicals like Charlie and the Chocolate factory and his Hammer horror homage with that same Sleepy Hollow (even if Sweeney Todd went more for Guignol meets 2000s horror brutality this time around). With Dark Shadows, however, Mr. Burton crams so much genre dissonance that you could tell he was better off juggling eggs than he was juggling the grenades and trigger sensitive dynamite that was the balance between staying faithful to the source material and trying to adapt something that was old enough to have existed in two different decades, before even his debut, for a new generation. The closest compliment I can give it is that both its heart and its brain are in the right place. It’s just missing the rest of its body parts.