AT THE MOVIES

With David Begelman

“Dark Shadows:” Reprising the Undead

If you’ve been scratching your head over why there’s a current boom of interest in vampires, answers may not be hard to find. Those blood-suckers are a canvas on which other enduring concerns are writ large—like our preoccupation with mortality. But don’t expect all the creatures to be nasty, at least not in the movies. True, original creations like Sheridan LeFanu’s 1872 “Carmilla,” Bram Stoker’s iconic 1897 “Dracula” and  Murnau’s 1922 “Nosferatu” had ugly dispositions. But that’s old hat.

The undead these days are characters with a fair share of benevolence, if not lovability. Wesley Snipes’ “Blade,” like Kate Beckinsale’s “Selena” in “Underworld,” are vampires you’d be eager to have as allies when the going gets rough. The same goes for some vampires in Anne Rice novels. Or those in teleseries like “True Blood” and “Twilight.” 

The release of Tim Burton’s “Dark Shadows” in May of this year coincided—the superstitious might say mysteriously—with the death of Jonathan Frid, the original vampire Barnabas in the 1960s and early 1970s teleseries. Frid, along with three other performers in the series, had walk-on roles in the film.

The movie explores another preoccupation of vampires, family history. Dracula boasted about his Transylvanian lineage going back to the glory days of Attila the Hun. Barnabas Collins, the blood-sucking hero of Burton’s film, while rueful about his undead plight, has a soft spot for relatives in his family estate of Collinwood. He can slaughter with impunity workers who freed him from his grave. A group of hippies high on weed meets the same fate. Yet his attitude toward the mortal family at the estate is one of solicitude.

Tim Burton, with his signature spin on matters dark, was a natural for directing “Dark Shadows.” And who is a better choice to cast as Barnabas than Johnny Depp? The actor has amassed an impressive record of offbeat and arresting characterizations. They include those in “Sleepy Hollow,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Sweeney Todd; The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” and the unforgettable “Edward Scissorhands,” all directed by Burton.

Barnabas is disadvantaged when freed from his faux slumber in 1972. Not only does he have to deal with the conniving witch Angelique (played by the alluring Eva Green), who is responsible for his entombed plight. He’s woefully unprepared for the twentieth century, not to mention its idiomatic ways. Had Burton exploited this conceit alone, “Dark Shadows” might have turned out to be less of a bomb than it is.

Memorable moments in the film are when Barnabas, despite immortal longings, comes off as a dunderhead when flummoxed by modernity. One of his relatives, the rebellious teenager Carolyn (Chloë Moretz), when faced with the vampire’s 18^th century demeanor, asks “Are you stoned?” He responds as though she were talking about the biblical form of retribution. Other advice imparted by Carolyn includes encouraging the vampire to get some normal friends.

After an amusing start, “Dark Shadows” goes into a free-fall, inept storyline. This includes tedious scenes of escalating battles between vampire and witch amid antique bric-a-brac and chandeliers; misdirected blood transfusions by a psychiatrist (Helena Bonham Carter); shock treatments administered to a child; going up in smoke when exposed to light, although sunlight is taken in stride with a broad-brimmed hat; having sex up and down walls and across ceilings; and sleeping upside down in upholstery.

There’s more, like serial dives off impossibly high cliffs, setting fire to everything, spot appearances by rocker Alice Cooper (if only to rattle the comfort level provided in a sound track by the Carpenters), and the usual round of inflamed villagers on the march, an inevitable  staple of horror flicks. It’s all too much to digest.