Dear reader, heed my warning: verily, the undead live. Not rotten-fleshed zombies or nocturnal ghouls, but old TV series from the 1960s and '70s, resurrected from the moldering vaults where they lay and given new life by devious Hollywood necromancers. In this deal with the Devil, they breathe new life into corpses where the spirit has long since departed, and set their foul creations upon an unsuspecting world.
Allow me to drive a stake through the heart of this latest monstrosity, "Dark Shadows," Tim Burton's big-screen adaptation of the "Gothic soap opera" which ran on American TV from 1966-1971. Burton stays firmly within his comfort zone — Johnny Depp in the lead, a bunch of likable misfits as characters, secondhand Hammer Horror set and costume design — and delivers a dull, Goth-lite flick that doesn't even come close to previous triumphs such as "Beetlejuice," "Sleepy Hollow" or "Corpse Bride".
"Dark Shadows" was set in and around the eerie Collinwood Manor in a small New England town, and the show really took off once it introduced family patriarch and vampire Barnabas Collins, originally played by Jonathan Frid. The series was broadcast live and moved at the glacial pace of afternoon soaps, so for the film version Burton has condensed plot lines that developed over literally hundreds of episodes into one talky, two-hour slog that winds up shortchanging everyone but Depp.