Review: "Dark Shadows the Movie" works as Burton and Depp story but not so much as homage to beloved series

"Dark Shadows the Movie" PG 13
Fans of the quirky 70s ghoulish soap opera, Dark Shadows, may be disappointed that this movie plays it all for camp. Tim Burton and his cast, including Depp, Phiffer, Carter and composer Danny Elfman, and Moretz as a mawkish teenager, make for good casting, and potential of making it work. The oddness seems to lie in the evident pause that Burton thought he was making the Addams Family. Dark Shadows was not the Addams Family. What little of the series that was viewed seems to indicate it was something of a dark, surreal soap opera with very little jokes, nothing like the Munsters decades before, or the Addams Family. Burton kind of hacked it like he did Alice in Wonderland (but that was kind of liked too). So it's not a bad movie, it just really isn't Dark Shadows. Depp plays Barnabas, the patriarch of the Collins family. (Yes, Stephanie Meyers ripped off Dark Shadows using that 'Cullen' name, whereas Cullen is merely another spelling of Collins). Anyways, he is cursed to become a vampire and tossed into a casket and buried for 200 years, to awaken in 1972, where he discovers the surviving descendants of his family still living, but in dire need to funds. When he finds the family fortune he is able to revive the fishing cannery they owned, but Angelica, the witch, is trying to destroy him because she loves him. At times there is almost a tinge of it being like the show, but it really never goes there. The jokes are sometimes very funny with an audience, especially the DS fans, but they were a bit disappointed. The movie wasn't really all that bad, it just wasn't the show. Depp plays himself as a ghoulish vampire. Burton can do great movies. This is not one of them. It i merely entertaining. And I did get the references having much older siblings, and they were funny, but that is not really the direction they should have gone. Spooky movies with the ghoulish and sometimes manic direction by Burton is either a hit like in Beetlejuice or a miss like in Planet of the Apes the remake, or the Alice movie. (He only produced Nightmare Before Christmas and lad little to do with Coraline).
     One off super blunder of note, a modern McDonald's sign is prominent before the store is being built near the grave and the sign reads '9 billion sold'. When the critic was working at a McDonald's a mere 22 years ago it was '1 billion sold' so that way back in 1972, it was about 500 million sold. It was a big deal in 1989-90 or so when they reached 1 billion sold. It did not happen before then. The critic was very young in that year but know a lot about it from family and from history. What the scenery looked like was California where you would see the fast cars, not a cool New England harbor town. It looked like the beach towns out west. That's wrong. also not all of the cars in the 1970s were either vans or muscle cars. The witch might have had one, but most likely the townspeople would have had regular sedans and wagons, especially in a fishing community in Boston. The muscle cars on the street were not commonly driven by everyone then. Regular folks had to carry passengers and backseat drivers around. Just some nitpicks.
Review by Adam Browne

Having not been a fan of the show could make it seem like this version didn't make much sense.