Dark Shadows (2012)

Yet another blog entry just to check something for this week... Unfortunately, the decision to avoid "Dark Shadows" almost 7 years ago ( OMG... 7 years :| ) was a good one. I didn't think that much now, and missing another option I decided to give it a chance.

I have to admit that the movie starts well, with a Tim Burton-ish intro like in the good old days (more than 7 years ago), where somewhere around 1770 the life of Barnabas Collins, a young entrepreneur in the fishing industry of Maine, is messed up by Angelique, a maid with sorcery abilities. In brief, the parents are crushed in an accident, his lover jumps over a cliff into the ocean, and Barnabas is transformed into a vampire and locked alive and buried in a coffin. We find Angelique 200 years later, still young, as a small mogul in the same fishing industry, where the Collins descendants struggle to survive. Barnabas to the rescue = the vampire is set free, and things start to look positive... until Angelique gets into it & the war begins again.

Up to half of its time the only part that's really questionable is the sound mixing. Despite a score, which is quite ok in terms of individual tracks, the mixing is so bad that's getting at some point effectively annoying. Besides that the action starts with an interesting premise, and gives you some hope... Unfortunately everything turns into a senseless salad a la Alice in Wonderland, where you don't really know why you're seeing what you see there. From the ephemeral (no pun intended) apparition of a ghost that saves the the Collins family, up to the completely random presence of a werewolf, which probably doesn't spend more than 3 minutes on the screen (and has zero impact in the plot development), everything seems like a "let's also quickly add this stuff too". Too bad about the potential it had.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (luckily we had the intro, otherwise...)