'Dark Shadows' review: Undead in the '70s? Groovy

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Picture / Warner Bros. Pictures

JOHNNY DEPP as Barnabas Collins in "Dark Shadows."

Dark Shadows

Horror comedy. Starring Johnny Depp, Eva Green and Michelle Pfeiffer. Directed by Tim Burton. (PG-13. 113 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

It's difficult to pay tribute to something in earnest and yet spoof it at the same time. Err too far on the side of sincerity, and you have something that rings false. Take the satire too far, and you have a movie that's funny for 15 minutes and then meaningless for the next hour and a half.

But in "Dark Shadows," Tim Burton and screenwriters Seth Grahame-Smith and John August get the balance right. They don't get it perfect. There are times, not too many, when the movie drags. But 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.

One graceful touch is that they plow through all the intricate backstory in an entertaining pre-credits sequence that tells how Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) became a vampire. In fact, he deserved what he got: "Dark Shadows" can be seen as the story of a man whose unaccountable taste in women - he says no to Eva Green, who plays a witch - lands him in a coffin for 200 years.

When he is dug out two centuries later, the year is 1972, but Barnabas still talks as if it were 1770, or like Johnny Depp in half of his movies. He sees a car's headlights and thinks he is s! eeing th e eyes of the devil. He sees a television set and believes that little people are trapped inside. You might think that the fish-out-of-water aspect might get old after two or three jokes, but "Dark Shadows" successfully taps that vein, so to speak, for the entire movie.

Part of the success comes from the fact that 1972 is alien not just to him, but to us. So mixed in there is an early-'70s spoof, of the drugs and the counterculture, and of Wishnick dolls, lava lamps and board games. In one scene, in the midst of a self-pitying rant, Barnabas rests his head on what appears to be a piano. But no, it's an organ, of a type that was popular in that era, and his head triggers one of the device's recorded backbeats.

So "Dark Shadows" works two kinds of comedy - comic dislocation and period satire. But wait, there's more. When Barnabas returns to his ancestral home, the lady of the house, his distant relation (Michelle Pfeiffer), makes him promise not to tell the rest of the household that he's a vampire. And so we get a perfect farce setup, in which the audience knows what's going on but most of the characters are only confused, as Barnabas picks up a fork and blithely remarks, "Had this been real silver, my hand would have burst into flame at the slightest touch."

All this comedy in constant motion makes it possible for "Dark Shadows" to concentrate on the plot mechanics only to the extent that they're interesting: Barnabas finds himself in an ongoing battle with Angelique (Green), who, being a witch, is eternally youthful and running half the town. These scenes between the fabulously confident Angelique and the dignified but easily rattled Barnabas are as funny as anything in the film. But this is also where the filmmakers inject a touch, the slightest touch, of seriousness. Angelique really is in love with this guy. She should get her head examined.

Depp has a lot of self-consciousness as an actor, but Barnabas is the most self-conscious of characters, and so the combination works. Gr! een brin gs dimension to what might have been a one-note villain, and the rest of the cast is up for fun, including Helena Bonham Carter as the family psychiatrist. However, the resolution of the psychiatrist's story line feels extraneous and makes for the picture's one sour note.

The sets and atmospherics are up to Tim Burton's usual high standard - he usually gets those right - and the early '70s music on the soundtrack has never sounded better, even stuff you wouldn't expect, such as the Carpenters' "Top of the World." When it came on, I found myself not wanting the song to end, and perhaps Burton felt that way, too, because he doesn't cut it off. He lets it play out.

Somehow the scene needed it. Who would have guessed?

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the SanFranciscoChronicle