Proficiency 1 - Unit 5

Proficiency One - Summary

A Vampire Thirsty and Puzzled

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Of all the morbid beauties in Tim Burton’s work,   “Dark Shadows,” is his  most pleasurable film in years. As Barnabas Collins, a young member of a wealthy family turned unwilling vampire, Mr. Depp has a face as white as chalk and long-fingered hands that skim the air like quick spiders. After 200 years of entombment, Barnabas awakes in 1972 and drinks in a world populated by monsters, living and dead, and lovingly adorned with Mr. Burton’s twisted signature.

It’s delightful to watch how Johnny Depp actor handles the vampire’s readjustment to the world of the living,  he mostly comes across like a visitor from another planet, more E. T. than Christopher Lee. Later, hiding from the sun under dark glasses, a charming hat and an umbrella — Stoker’s creation moves around in daylight, too,— Barnabas also suggests the later-life Michael Jackson.

Collin  returns to the now-dilapidated Collins family mansion, where, in the picturesque decay and scattered children’s toys — a nice suburban touch — he meets his living descendants, including the matriarch, Elizabeth (a wonderful Michelle Pfeiffer); her brother, Roger (Jonny Lee Miller); her teenage daughter, Carolyn (Chloë Grace Moretz); and Roger’s son, David (Gully McGrath), whose dark looks recall the evil child in the 1976 horror film “The Omen.” Barnabas, of course, fits right in with this freak show, even while remaining his own (dead) man.

Mr. Burton’s film resurrects an old television show that was partly inspired by the 1950s and ’60s vampire flicks produced by the British studio Hammer, which were in turn influenced by decades of fang-ster gore and glory.

 “Dark Shadows” isn’t among Mr. Burton’s most richly realized works, but it’s very enjoyable, visually rich and, despite its melancholic material and a sporadic tremor of violence, surprisingly effervescent.

It opens in the USA on May 13^th, 2012.