Dark shadows

Year of release : 2012

Run time : 1h53m

Genre : Gothic Horror / Comedy

Cast : Johnny Depp, Eva Green, Michelle Pfeiffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Chloe Grace Moretz, Jonny Lee Miller, Alice Cooper

Director : Tim Burton

The movie is based on the Gothic television series of the same name created by Dan Curtis, first aired in 1966.

In 1760 Barnabas Collins and his parents left Liverpool for Maine, where they built a fishing business empire. Their business did so well, they also helped the town, calling it Collinsport.

It took them 15 years to build their manor, Collinwood.

Barnabas is fooling around with the daughter of one of their servants, who’s also one of their employees. The girl is in love with him, and when she asks him to tell her he loves her too, he tells her he’d lie if he told her he loved her.

So the girl makes a spell, and k1lls his parents and then drives his girlfriend to suicide.

When Josette is throwing herself off the cliff, Barnabas follows her and throws himself after her, but he doesn’t die, turning into a vampire.

After, Angelique calls the town’s people on him, and they bury him alive.

In 1972, Maggie travels to Maine, as she hopes she’ll be hired as a governess for young David, Roger Collins’ son. Because she was her whole life in a mental institution for seeing Josette’s ghost, she changed her name to Victoria Winters after she escaped. She also looks exactly like Josette.

The matriarch of the family, Elizabeth, hires her. She tells her David has had a live-in psychiatrist for 3 years. The kid seems fine, the psychiatrist, on the other hand, is always drunk.

Victoria is gonna get along with David just fine, as he sees ghosts too, his mother.

A construction crew digs up Barnabas’ coffin, and he k1lls them all, being a vampire.

Barnabas goes home, to Collinwood, where he hypnotizes the caretaker into being his servant.

Entering the mansion, the kids see he looks exactly like Barnabas’ painting, and talking to Elizabeth, he shows her where the hidden treasure is.

He restores the mansion and the offices of the family business.

Speaking of which, the family business kinda tanked, since Angelique created her own and became the most important business in town. Hearing about the coffin and the construction workers missing, she goes straight to Collinwood, to greet Barnabas, and she still wants him.

Barnabas sees Victoria, and wants her, although, again, occasionally he fools around with Angelique.

Angelique wants her company to be the only one in town, and wants to buy Barnabas’ business, but he refuses.

The stay-in doctor hypnotizes Barnabas (he’s a vampire, but he can be hypnotized, not just that, hypnotized just by looking at the medallion going back and forth. Eye roll) and finds out he’s a vampire, so she convinces him to let her treat him of vampirism, by giving him blood transfusions, just that she uses his blood to give herself blood transfusions, to stay young.

Because Barnabas still doesn’t want Angelique, nor wants to sell her his family business, Angelique is on a vengeance path again.

The movie for some unknown reason bored me, I almost fell asleep a few times. The movie looked good, it was filmed on a bluish color palette. I liked the world created, the small town and the Collins house (it was gorgeous inside and out). But..it felt it didn’t go anywhere, as it wasn’t much character development, and the story revolved pretty much around Barnabas and Angelique.

The characters are unlikeable, because Barnabas k1lls the people he befriends, like the hippies, and is shady towards Angelique, as towards the end of the movie he tells her he might have loved her if she wasn’t such a b1atch, just that that’s not what he said at the beginning of the movie.

Angelique seems to be a woman scorned, who, hating Barnabas for not loving her, she hates his whole family, cursing them too, for no reason, just to get back at him.

Victoria SPOILERS throws herself off the cliff because Barnabas will always be young and beautiful (he looks ridiculous) while she’ll age,(but she looks 20, so she’ll have a good 15 years on her), so she wants to be a vampire. After she falls she says she’s Josette. It cannot be, as she was haunted by Josette, so she is not Josette’s reincarnation! END OF SPOILERS

Carolyn who is revealed SPOILER to be a werewolf towards the end of the movie END OF SPOILER, seems to be high all the time. I don’t know if that was the case, or if she was like that because she was a werewolf.

The doctor who’s supposed to be a psychiatrist, but she can do other things general doctors do, who lives in the Collins mansion, is always drunk, and SPOILERS then is injecting herself Barnabas’ blood to always be young and beautiful.END OF SPOILERS

Roger is a good for nothing man, who steals other people’s belongings.

Johnny Depp looked ridiculous with the pale makeup with lipstick and hair. I couldn’t believe Angelique found him attractive. Speaking of Johnny Depp, apparently he always wanted to play Barnabas.

Eva Green is gorgeous, but she doesn’t look good with blonde hair.

The movie is labelled as horror, but I didn’t find it scary.

The acting was good.

Alice Cooper makes a cameo appearance as the musical guest at an event. The performance was like the kind he used to do on stage at the time the action of the movie takes place.

Christopher Lee makes a cameo in the movie too.

Eva Green also played her character’s mother (she’s one of my favorite actresses and I recognized her voice).

The soundtrack by Danny Elfman was good. The artists’ songs featured in the movie were the ones released around the time the movie’s action takes place.

The visual effects were good.

The movie grossed 245.5 million dollars at the box office, against a 150 million dollars budget.

The movie received mixed reviews, with Cinema Score audiences grading the movie a B-.

You can watch the full movie for free on the Ok.Ru platform, in English, with Romanian subtitles, and dubbed in Russian or Italian, I believe.

Rating : Could have been a contender !