I will concede that I am fonder of Dark Shadows than most. I’ve been disappointed with a lot of Tim Burton’s recent output, but something about his revival of the seventies soap opera worked strangely well. I’ll be the first to concede that it’s pretty esoteric. After all, like Casa de mi Padre, it’s effectively one single joke stretched across a film’s runtime. However, I couldn’t help but warm to it, at least because it seemed like Burton was enjoying himself a lot more than head been with films like Alice in Wonderland. There was something quite cheeky about it, from the way that it portrayed its central character as ridiculously unheroic through to the fact that it was perhaps the year’s most subversive feminist film.
Indeed, watching the film again this weekend, it struck me just how feminist the narrative actually was, despite the somewhat superficial distractions from that.
Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: Angelique, Angelique Bouchard Collins, arts, Barnaba, Barnabas, Christopher Lee, Dark Shadow, Dark Shadows, Elizabeth, Hoffman, horror, johnny depp, Programs, Soap opera, Television, tim burton, Victoria | 2 Comments »