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| Tim Burton's Dark Shadows |
She doesn't quite know what awaits on the other side of that door...quite the house of eccentrics.
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Perhaps the loudest spoofing part to Burton’s film is the
excessive make-up and incredibly bright hair color tone. Julia Hoffman’s bright
red coif is a major distraction (I had a really hard time seeing Bonham-Carter
through the hair, which is a shame considering I can typically enjoy the
actress even under heavy treatments done to her face and hair), and Angelique
has a banana blond hair that would reduce lesser actresses to shambles if she
weren’t fetching despite the wardrobes and heavy make-up. I think it is
because, despite the make-, tonal spoofery, and costuming, some of the cast
members (mainly Depp, Emma, and Michelle Pfeiffer (who I still think is miscast
despite the fact that I just relished her ability to take the material and add
significant touches, such as reactions and mannerisms that fit the scenes she’s
in; it is basically winking at us that her character isn’t oblivious to how a
vampire in her family could be a double-edged sword or the fact her relatives
are daft) make the most of the characters provided them. Chloe Mertz as Carolyn
did nothing for me and the attempts to turn her into a 70s teen never resonated
with me. She basically wears this wise-ass snarl as an expression throughout,
and her attitude towards others is that they don’t have a clue while she has it
all figured out. Depp may be reduced to a heavily made-up caricature of
vampiric Victorian Counts, with a language and manners alien to 70s era
society, but he plays to the material as George Hamilton did in Love in First
Bite. It’s theatrical and expressive, the way he uses his eyebrows and fingers
to speak, while speaking in long, often-poetic sentences that leave those
around him (except Angelique who seems eroticized by him) in puzzlement and at
a loss for how to respond. I personally adore Gothic horror, and sometimes a
movie like this does rub me the wrong way when it keeps telling us that the
genre is so worthy of mockery. Maybe to many it is, but I personally, after a
while, grow tiresome of being told that the genre (or the show, Dark Shadows)
just can’t be taken seriously. I felt this, at times, when watching Coppola’s
Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
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