Fangs for Nothing

After not just one but two Dark Shadows movies plus an attempt at a syndicated television reboot, one could argue that the old Dan Curtis Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows was long overdue for a less serious approach if for no other reason that yet another serious attempt did not seem likely to succeed. And yet there was something so pathetic about the humor in the recent Tim Burton movie version of the classic program that I can not help but wonder why he bothered.

Part of the problem is that both Burton and his humble scribe Seth Grahame-Smith seemed to think that no one other than them had ever tried to find any humor in the vampire movie genre. As far as they were concerned, movies like The Fearless Vampire Killers and Love at First Bite never existed. Neither did Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. And, of course, TV shows like Buffy and Angel were unthinkable as far as Burton and Grahame-Smith were concerned.

Nor were Burton and Grahame-Smith especially prone to raising the bar in regard to said humor. For example, Grahame-Smith's idea of wittily satirizing the 1970s -- the decade in which the movie's vampiric protagonist Barnabas Collins awoke -- seemed to consist of heroically ridiculing the same things comedy shows in the 1970s poked fun at way back then -- the only difference between then and now being that, instead of giving us the wit of a M.A.S.H. or an All in the Family, the screenwriter gave us repetitive bad jokes about Love Story and the Carpenters. The movie even managed to make the same hippie culture that inspired Taxi's Reverend Jim character and Doonesbury's Zonker Harris seem unfunny -- though admittedly there have been a lot of bad hippie jokes since 1979.

If the movie had any point to make with such humor, such gags could easily be forgiven but it did not. Indeed, the whole film seemed to be rather purposeless. Was it about family? Not really. The contrast between the 1970s and the 2010s? Not really. Burton and Grahame-Smith had a chance to go that route early in the movie but instead they chose to include more jokes about bad songs and fast food restaurants. There was one nifty visual sequence in which Burton used a series of portraits to show the various incarnations of an exceptionally long-lived character but that alone was not enough to save this movie. And please don't get me started on the movie's various plot twists.

Even the romantic triangle that was at the heart of the original Dark Shadows (the one that involved Barnabas, his bride-to-be Josette, and his would-be lover/servant/witch Angelique) proved less than satisfying. On one hand, Burton and Grahame-Smith did a good job of summing up the back story of Barnabas Collins in an efficient manner. On the other hand, they seemed at a loss as to what to do with it when the scene switched to the modern day. And Grahame-Smith's decision to play Angelique's side of the triangle for laughes did not help matters.

In short, Dark Shadows tried to be a comedy, a romance and a horror movie all at once, only to fail at all three. I guess it was a good thing that Burton was less ambitious or the movie would have been even more terrible. Or at least longer.