Dark Shadows

After a nearly 200 year imprisonment, vampire Depp confronts 1970’s pop-culture, dysfunctional descendants, a family business in ruin, and the witch who cursed him. Burton frames the film in his usual quirky visual style and Depp’s charismatic performance apes original Barnabas Collins’ portrayer Jonathan Frid’s rigid delivery almost to the point of caricature, but Grahame-Smith’s script seems paralyzed by the multitude of ways to approach the material, veering between comedy, horror and drama without committing to any of them, resulting in a film that feels hollow beneath all its polish.