Barnabas Backlash Begins

It’s one thing to be disappointed by a movie trailer. It’s another to be absolutely, completely blind-sided by a trailer revealing not only that the film looks horrible, but is a complete departure from what you believed the film to be in the first place.

I’m sure I speak for more than myself when I say last week’s first trailer debut of Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows was both horrible and unsettling.

To my knowledge, the project has been fairly secretive, with only minor information and a handful of photos being released to the public. The marriage of Burton and the classic gothic soap opera was perfect enough to fantasize about since first hearing the rumors of its development, but then the Johnny Depp casting became the pièce de résistance.

Tim Burton described the new movie saying it “feels different even though it’s a similar story” and that they were “kind of expanding it a bit.”

Apparently, there’s such a fine line between expansion and rape.

Even in my worst nightmares, Tim Burton would take the cult classic television series, which only lasted 5 years but ran in infinite repeats throughout the 70s, and churn out another mediocre incoherent experience like Planet of the Apes or Sweeney Todd.

I never expected I’d turn my eyes away in horror like a vampire to sunlight.

The trailer starts out innocently enough, with some drab tones of gothic greatness that truly feels as if the television series is getting its big budget adaptation due. Then, there’s some strange mumbo-jumbo about a witch and a spell and Barnabas rises from his coffin like Jack Skellington and he asks what year it is and then BAM—a WTF moment worthy of the he’s a she twist of The Crying Game.

Cue the T Rex track, shift to Barry White, throw in some bad jokes about pop culture and mix with a dash of misplaced innuendo.

It seems Tim Burton has secretly replaced the soap opera supernatural drama of the original series with a campy fish out of water tale set in a time warp traveled 1972 setting. It’s one big joke on fans though, as it’s now clear the movie is more Bettlejuice than Sleepy Hollow.

And maybe this trailer wouldn’t be so jarring if they didn’t pull such a massive rug from underneath the fans. A little camp would have been welcome, but this trailer is pure comedy cheese, with several scenes that look lifted from Burton’s collective filmography.

I’ve been disappointed with the director’s films in later years, post the hugely underrated Big Fish. I respect Burton as a visionary auteur, and I’m fairly excited that he has expanded Frankenweenie into a feature film at last. But, Dark Shadows could and should have reestablished the director’s unique ability to recapture some of the magic of the media that so influenced him as a child. Sleepy Hollow is a love letter to the Hammer Studios gothic monster movies. Batman Returns is a grandiose merge of Burton goth and DC Comics hand-holding. Ed Wood is a cinematic love letter just as good, if not better, than The Artist or Hugo. Has the director been kidnapped by aliens from Mars and had his brain swapped with a Chihuahua?

I hate to judge Dark Shadows by this early trailer, but it left such a bad first impression that I had to watch several vintage episodes of the original series on Netflix just to remind me that the show was actually the groundbreaking, spooky, weird little show that I remembered it to be.

Then, to give me just a tad more faith and willingness to not judge a chicken before it hatches, I witnessed another movie surprise this weekend. The similarly comedically injected 21 Jump Street was an absolute impossibility on paper. Promoted as a jokey take on a series not necessarily needed on the big screen, a la Starsky and Hutch, my expectations for the film were low and my desire to see it non-existent.

Then the reviews came in, as well as word of mouth from people who had caught early screenings, including Forces of Geek‘s own Stefan Blitz. With an 86% (as of this posting) on Rotten Tomatoes, it had to be seen to be believed. I may not have been the target audience of Jump Street‘s lowbrow ad campaign, but thanks to word-of-mouth I’m glad the film was so much smarter than it could have been.

I’m not holding my breath that Dark Shadows will fare as well.