Dark Shadows Reviews
Top CriticThis is not so much a coherent movie as it is a long, expensive joke in search of a purpose.
Mostly Dark Shadows is silly when we're trained to expect slightly richer fun from Burton and Depp.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Fans of Depp's past collusions with Burton will find their rewards along the way. But there's a perfunctory vibe to the goings on, a weariness amid the weirdness.
Clearly, they made the movie they wanted to make. It's just not the movie this "Dark Shadows" fan hoped to see.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Dark Shadows' only meaningful relationship is between Depp and his audience. He's a persona now, no longer an actor.
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| Original Score: 2/4
How bad is "Dark Shadows"? It makes you long for a "Twilight" movie. That's bad.
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| Original Score: D+
"Dark Shadows'' certainly has its moments, especially when Barnabas and Angelique hilariously wreck her office during a surreal, CGI-fueled, PG-rated tryst.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
At once a brash, strutting pop culture pastiche and gloomy exercise in self-cannibalizing nostalgia, "Dark Shadows" is depressing on myriad levels.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Can't decide whether it's a parody, a horror comedy, an atmospheric melodrama, or a tedious bucket of crap. Eventually it chooses the last one.
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| Original Score: D
When you consider all the pitfalls avoided, and all the laughs and pleasures it provides along the way, "Dark Shadows" is a satisfying and skillful effort.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Burton's offbeat montages are amusing, but the story's slow start and overblown conclusion make Dark Shadows half a good movie.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Burton's offbeat montages are amusing, but the story's slow start and overblown conclusion make Dark Shadows half a good movie.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
An uncertain combination of elements that unsuccessfully tries to be half-scary, half-funny and all strange...
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
"Dark Shadows" is amusing, in fits and spurts, and sure to make tons of money, but terribly familiar and fatigued.
[Burton] and Depp, both avowed childhood fans of the original series, seem to be in their element and having a grand old time.
Handsome, vaguely true to the old soap opera, and inert.
"Dark Shadows" opens promisingly, downshifts after 30 minutes, and sputters into a meandering, momentum-free mess.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The script by Seth Grahame-Smith is witless and meandering - and I wouldn't mind the witless so much if it moved, or the meandering if it were droll.
The film's biggest disappointment is the utter lack of chemistry between Depp and either Green or Heathcote.
Full Review
| Original Score: C-
Whether it works is a matter of taste, but the fact that Burton's revisit unearths enough fun while feeling like four films in one is testament to the source's seductive bloodline.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
"Dark Shadows" doesn't add anything new to the genre, but it's a surprisingly high-spirited and genuinely black-humored comedy.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A nutty romp that's as much about celebrating a significant blip in the pop-cult continuum as it is a tale of bloodsucking, of grudge-holding, and the stress involved in maintaining a 200-room, two-century-old house.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Burton's visuals are a sumptuous treat, as is Depp's unerring sense of mischief - but, after a fierce and funny start, Dark Shadows simply spins its wheels.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
An expensive, all-star bore, albeit a bore that's been art-directed to a fare-thee-well.
Tim Burton is like a billionaire fanboy who buys Bela Lugosi's Dracula cape: he has a perfect right to it, but that doesn't mean it looks good on him.
Stumbles blindly along with Barnabas for most of its overlong 113 minutes, leaving viewers in the dark as to its intentions.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Attention must be paid to movie allure, in a star like Depp and his current harem.
Johnny Depp and Tim Burton enable each other's laziest, most indulgent habits: They make movies to entertain themselves instead of the audience.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
"Dark Shadows" isn't among Mr. Burton's most richly realized works, but it's very enjoyable, visually sumptuous and, despite its lugubrious source material and a sporadic tremor of violence, surprisingly effervescent.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
You keep wishing that the movie was either scarier or funnier - too often it flatlines between the two - but it's nonetheless impossible to look away.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
"Dark Shadows" offers potent atmosphere and delirious '70s fashions and hilarious gags and some really terrific performances, none better than Pfeiffer's triumphant return to the screen as a pitch-perfect family matriarch.
"Dark Shadows" illustrates the fine line in a pop reboot between "relaxed" and "lazy."
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
It offers wonderful things, but they aren't what's important. It's as if Burton directed at arm's length, unwilling to find juice in the story.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
"Shadows" leaves us with the sense that this isn't the last time we'll be seeing Barnabas and company. One can only hope that next time they'll work out the kinks.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Dark Shadows, a kinky love triangle, is true, in its fashion, to the spirit of the old soap opera. Yet its real love affair is between Johnny Depp and the audience who's still hooked on seeing him get his freak on.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Bipolar film that's equal parts comedy and horror show, with neither element particularly effective.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Dark Shadows is a mess, and it's unclear whether its bizarre recipe of comedy, campy horror, and gothic melodrama will satisfy anyone, regardless of their familiarity with the source material.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
In a time when even the most accomplished genre movies have the fingerprints of focus group-happy execs all over them, the relatively unmitigated quirk of Dark Shadows is worth celebrating.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Dark Shadows sinks its teeth half-way into its potentially meaty material but hesitates to go all the way.
Less a resurrection than a clumsy desecration.
Burton, as usual, is great on atmosphere and comic timing (these are his weirdest moments since Ed Wood), but less so at reining in an overcomplicated plot and dimly lit action scenes.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
The film itself takes awhile to get going as it establishes all those characters and back stories. Once there, it seems to have nowhere to go -- out of the shadows or into the light, it doesn't really matter either way.
Few director-star partnerships are as consistently eccentric or malleable as that of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, but even loyalists will detect an odor of mothballs clinging to their eighth bigscreen collaboration.
