Based on the hit late 1960s-early 70s TV show, master of macabre, director, Tim Burton, joins forces with his go-to actor Johnny Depp in recreating a modern-day/throwback version for the big screen. From Chocolatier to Sweeney Todd, Madd Hatter to Edward Scissorhands, Depp moves thru eight years of Burton films landing into this role of Barnabas Collins. As a vampire – who’s freed after slumbering in a coffin for a couple of centuries – Collins returns home to his ancestors where apparently blood is thicker than well, blood.
Roger (Johnny Lee Miller) heads the household, Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer) is the matriarch, and teen rebel
Carolyn (Chole Grace Moretz) is the hilarious rebel teenager. Burton’s real life wife -Helena Bonham Carter – plays the Doctor who’s been sent to the house to counsel a child who “sees dead people.”
Part Ed Wood meets Scissorhands, this film adds in retro 70s dopey-flower-power-lava lamps and soundtrack, with a young woman who is reincarnated as Collins lost-love Victoria (Bella Heathcote) who’s very Valley-of-the-Dolls gorgeous. She is nanny to the child in a household of cliché one dimensional characters (though Seth Grahame-Smith’s script is brilliant and the performances as good as they all can be.)
Depp is freakishly spot-on taking Barnabas Collins to new heights from the soap opera-y version of past decades. He’s both threatening and disarming with a high level of self-esteem, in a way that makes him almost as cool as Alice Cooper, who performs as Alice Cooper.
But it’s Eva Green as a witch-mortal – unable to take a hint that “it’s over bitch” – and still demanding Depp’s love in every reincarnation, that steals the scene, especially when these two star-crossed-lover-blood-sucking-vampires give new meaning to the word foreplay. Three and a half tiaras