Dark Shadows: That one with Johnny Depp where he acts weird.

Stop me if you have seen this movie before: directed by Tim Burton, starring Johnny Depp, and his wife Helena Bonham Carter. No seriously, I will wait for you to figure which of the Tim Burton abortions I could be describing. Time's up because it is Dark Shadows and it is awful. Burton has been responsible for putting some really bad "film" in front of us before. Which is why saying that this is probably his worst effort to date is really saying something, although with "FrankenWeenie" will be coming out soon so that distinction could, and probably will, be short lived.

I was not alive for nor have ever actually watched an episode of the original TV show that Burton adapted Dark Shadows. I suspect that Timmy boy shares the latter part of that statement with me as I learned from researching the source material, also named Dark Shadows. It appears as though he went through the imdb listing for the old show, like I did, and just pulled names from the characters and then put his dumb and tired staple of throw some gothic design at it concept and then called it a day. It actually baffles me that people not only keep letting him make movies, but that people actually keep going to them and then defending the trash afterwards.

Then there is the Johnny Depp situation. We get it. You like to put makeup on and play the exact same character you have in virtually every Tim Burton movie ever. Why not just let Tim, Johnny, and Helena make home movies and spare everyone else the indignity of having to know that this trash exists, but something terrific like Cabin in the Woods had to be in release limbo for almost three years after it was completed?

Back to making fun of the movie itself, in Burton's world of vampires, they are able to go out in broad daylight with the protection of an umbrella and sunglasses, umm ok then. The movie is also supposed to be a comedy, which I had to look up on imdb to find that detail out because there are actually negative laughs to be had in this dreadful affair. The only bright spots in the thing are when Eva Green is on screen looking absolutely bombshell-like. Other than that there isn't really much here to get excited about. Chloe Moretz, who is normally a great actress, is especially disappointing in it because I had high hopes for her to save part of the movie at least. At almost two hours long it is both painful to watch and just a very long snoozefest that I could have avoided altogether, but I needed to watch something that I knew would be bad. I guess that the point could be made that I never really gave this trash a chance, but I did. Unfortunately for me and anyone else who goes to watch Dark Shadows, it has a bad beginning, middle, ending, and at no point does it ever let the viewer off the hook of never wanting to see it again.

Final verdict: If you want to have something to complain about then waste your time watching Dark Shadows, if not, then just go watch The Avengers again.