Looks kinda funny. I’m really looking forward to Depp in Lone Ranger. His Tonto is wicked.
Indeed. Why come up with a new idea when you can rip off another one?
I loved the original Dark Shadows so much that I would literally run home from school to watch it. School dismissed at 3:15pm, the show started at 3:30, and I lived half a mile away. (I had a bicycle, but for some reason my parents didn’t like me taking it to school.) Many of my friends did the same.
I only recently learned it was to be a movie and that Jonathan Frid has died. Has it come out yet?
Didn’t we all?
No, some of us ran home to watch Star Trek - you all are wierd.
In other news, I never watched the original Dark Shadows - but we are going to go see this.
Bumping this as the film comes out - I saw it at midnight as emotional support for my fiance. MY GOD IT WAS AWFUL. SERIOUSLY. It was TEDIOUS, which is the worst thing I can possibly say about any movie. Be bad! Be furiously awfully bad! But do not bore me! Allow me to spoiler further remarks.
[spoiler]It can’t decide if it wants to be funny or not, so the trailer bits are most of the “fish out of water” comedy. Which I hated the idea of but at least it was an IDEA. I didn’t give the tiniest damn about any character in the whole thing with the possible exception of the house itself. They plain forgot about characters for half-hours at a time and then pretended like you were invested in their problems all of a sudden. AT THE END OF THE MOVIE SOMEBODY TURNS OUT TO BE A WEREWOLF FOR NO REASON.
As usual, the production design is amazing and Johnny Depp gives 150%. I actually quite liked his Barnabas. But the script, oy vey! Absolutely awful, the sort of thing where they tell you how you should feel about people without investing effort into showing you why and where they just move people around to the demands of the plot with no rhyme or reason. What a waste of some good actors and a good idea!
They could have done so much better so much more easily - say, either take out the 18th century bits or make them half the movie and that would give the audience more room to get attached to the characters. Either take out the comedy or make the movie a comedy. And good lord please nix almost all obvious visual effects.
There were some good moments that kept getting my hopes up - the first ghost Victoria sees is genuinely creepy and makes you want to know more about stuff, and then they just sort of drop that. Very frustrating. ARGH, I’m still mad about it, and I’m going to fall asleep at work today because of this shitty movie.[/spoiler]
Just saw this today. It’s easily three times as funny as the movie appears to be.
I saw it today - not bad, but the train scene at the beginning (under the opening credits) pulled me right out of the world they were creating, as it was supposed to be 1972, but the train was a modern Amtrak Downeaster train, with a locomotive that was introduced in the early 90’s, the cars painted in a scheme and logo that didn’t exist until the 2000’s, and the other locomotive being a refurbished cab control unit that also didn’t exist until around the turn of the century. I realize this was a product placement issue, but still…
And for as important a character as Victoria Winters is supposed to be, she didn’t actually have much screen time.
I’m liking this movie less and less.
Seriously, they forget she exists for 70% of the screen time.
I came away from this spoof wondering what was the point of it? No horror, no suspense, no romance. Just one long tedious, tasteless parody. But who is laughing?
I don’t consider the original series camp. Dan Curtis was not sending up gothic romances and horror stories. He was adapting them to a daily serial. The audience was intended to take the melodrama seriously.
What Burton and Depp spawned is camp, and not very good camp.
We had nothing to do last night so decided to see it. Meh. Not enough comedy for a comedy. Not serious enough to be horror. Not angsty enough to be melodrama. Burton needed to step back and decide what kind of a movie it was before he started filming. The trailers were completely misleading. Made it look like a straight up comedy. For the most part everyone did a decent job with what they were given. Kickass girl annoyed me. Vicky was not written well enough to understand why she would fall for barnabas. I have never understood the appeal of Eva Green.
I saw the film last night. I never watched the series.
I liked it a great deal. It certainly stuck with me more than The Avengers. Had a few creepy moments but mostly just plain fun.
The only think I didn’t like was Alice Cooper. It just didn’t work.
Mars Attacks was purposely camp and I thought it worked. Blue Velvet also had a lot of “camp” in it.
I just came home from seeing this and for what it’s worth I really enjoyed it a lot! Tons of 70’s references, all the plots I remember from the series, and it was fun looking for the cameos.
And, oh yeah, Johnny Depp.
All in all, a nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon with a friend. Great art? No. But a fun escape movie.
It was a fun movie and pretty enjoyable darkly light-hearted fair. I watched the original a little as a little kid with my older system but didn’t really remember it. So no disappointment was possible.
Not one of Burton’s better efforts, but as usual Depp was amazing & the movie really was a lot of fun if you go in with low expectations.
I’ll pass on seeing it.
I wonder how appreciation of it correlates to whether or not one watched the series.
I’ll pass too. I’ve read too many negative reviews and love the original series too much.
Still might see it- it’s a big enough film that we’ll likely get it in English with subtitles.
Fun fact- once, in a writing class, our instructor decided to absolutely spoil us by getting us a real, live author who had just published his first book. He’d also done some TV writing.
What TV? Seems there was this one soap he wrote for…
Poor guy couldn’t get the class back on the rails after we found that out.
Well, hrmph. I thought it was good! Was it this generation’s Casablanca? Of course not, but it was an entertaining Friday night in my book.
The sets, costumes, and way it was filmed were all nice- I don’t want to say “beautiful,” but definitely well done/pleasing to the eye/ all that jazz. I’ve got a fondness for how Burton lights his films- I have no idea what you’d call it, but I find the lighting in his films far more dynamic than the average movie. Depp’s character was, per usual, really well done. Eva Green and, well, heck, a lot of them just were great. Sure, not the deepest, most evolved characters, but I think everyone played their parts well.
FWIW, I’ve never seen the TV show (though I’m named for one of the characters!), but I went into the movie understanding that the whole premise is a bit campy and that the original show was ridiculous in its low budget silliness.