Are you ready?
Dark Shadows is....NOT a better love story than Twilight.
I know, I know. Sorry, I had to brush my teeth after letting that come out of my mouth. But I had to say it. This movie is terrible, and the worst part, the absolute, bottom of the barrel worst part in it is the "love story" between Johnny Depp's Barnabas Collins and Victoria. Why?
Say what you will about how vapid the love story in Twilight is. I certainly said it in my rant on the subject (look through the archives for the video) but you know what? As stupid as it was, it at least existed. At least we saw Edward and Bella together, DOING things. Here, you see Victoria near the end of the movie and you're just like, "who is that? Oh yeah, that girl we've seen for a total of about seven minutes of screen time. More like two minutes if you're talking about her with Depp's character.
Sure, Bartholomew talks about loving her once or twice, and asks people how to woo a woman in this new day and age (for those of you who don't know, Barnabas was locked in a coffin for 200 years and was let out in 1972), but we never see him try any methods of getting her attention. He just says he loves her near the end and she just kind of says "Sweet, I love you too."
In fact, the whole movie's problem is that they just talk about things. We hear about how the young Collins son is considered to be deranged after the death of his mother, but we never see any evidence of it. He dresses as a ghost to try to scare people? He plays with dinosaur toys? Man, this kid must be a real wacko for an eight year old.
The second message of the story is told to you so blatantly that they may as well put up a large neon sign with it: Family is the only real treasure. Again though, we never see any of it. Barnabas likes to talk about how important family is, but we don't really see him interacting with the modern-day Collins family. There's one scene where he tells the young boy's womanizing sleazebag father to shape up or get out of his son's life. So, naturally in the theme of the movie he realizes his mistakes and learns to put family fir-OH WAIT no he just takes a bunch of money and ditches the kid. Real nice.
Huh...may have busted out the spongebob pic too early.
There also this "HUGE" plot twist in the end about how each family member is supernaturally cursed, the daughter is a werewolf, the son communicates with vengeful spirits of the dead, but who cares? There's nothing leading up to the daughter's condition, so we're just left going "...huh. So I guess that's a thing".
Heck, the movie isn't even about the family. It's about Depp's character and the witch who turned him into a vampire because he wouldn't love her. There's this whole dilemma of Barnabas hating her, but he can't resist sleeping with her (or, rather, jumping around the room with all their clothes clearly still on). But even THAT is underdeveloped because it takes time out to try to cram in all the other underdeveloped, for lack of a better phrase, "plot points."
Visually, sure, Depp makes a decent vampire. Sure, the castle is cool looking. It's not enough to save this however. I wouldn't tell you to go watch Twilight instead (unless you have the rifftrax or something), but save your money and rent almost any OTHER vampire movie.
p.s. How did the Collins family survive? We see Bartholomew's parents get killed, and we never see any brothers or sisters. We aren't told he had kids in the 1700's so what the hell?
