A Shiny Coffin Filled with Farts

In Dark Shadows, Tim Burton boldly challenges the notion that movies are a medium for telling stories. He flips the entire paradigm on its head! F*ck you, story! Thing happens! Reaction shot! That’s all you need! The whole thing is basically Tim Burton screaming gibberish at Johnny Depp to make him confused, because it’s cute when Johnny Deppp cocks his head to the side like a puppy.

"Chevy?"

Well, it is.

Good B-movies and schlock (and the kind of fancy Disney-goth Tim Burton used to be a master of) almost always hook you with an over-the-top premise, then, once you’re in the tent, reveal nuance, and engage you in such way that the characters start to feel real. You start to actually care about them – this wolfman, does he have nards? Dark Shadows does nearly the opposite, where a compelling-ish premise leads to a series of increasingly baffling situations happening to people who might as well be random passersby. By the end, I felt like Royal Tenenbaum, shouting “Characters? What characters? All I saw was a bunch of actors wearing costumes!”

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Seth Grahame-Smith (aka Seth Jared Greenberg – why would you give yourself a hyphenated name on purpose?) has written Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies so far, and if you think he’s abandoning his gimmick just because everyone else is also cashing in on it now too (see also: Snow White & The Huntsman, Little Red Riding Hood with werewolves, Edgar Allen Poe: Murder Detective, Swordfighting Shakespeare, etc., etc., etc.), you’d be wrong. As his recent interview in The Hollywood Reporter begins:

Mash-up king Seth Grahame-Smith’s new novel Unholy Night re-imagines the story of the Three Wise Men of the Nativity as a swords-and-sandals adventure romp.
It turns Balthazar, one of the Wise Men, into a swashbuckling thief, who ends up helping Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus escape the clutches of Pontius Pilate, while encountering supernatural things along the way.

YOU STOP THAT, HAND! DON’T YOU START DISMISSIVELY WANKING ON ME NOW, WE’VE STILL GOT WORK TO DO!

But it turns out, adding werewolves and zombies and vampires and Predator and the duppie (DA DUPPIE!) to old stories isn’t all he’s been up to (sidenote: come on man, the bible already has lepers, a talking bush, and the Jewish aquaman who can manifest booze and fish sandwiches, does it really need MORE supernatural?). Turns out he’s also a scriptwriter. Having already worked with Tim Burton on Dark Shadows, he’s also got a stop-motion animated project called Night of the Living and a Beetlejuice sequel, both for Burton.

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THIS WEEK IN POSTERS: Okay, I don’t like to bore you guys with too much of the behind-the-scenes around these parts, but just to clarify, I wasn’t lying when I said that I was moving this feature to Wednesdays. It’s just that I wrote up the whole thing Wednesday, hit ‘Publish,’ and instead of actually publishing, the entire post decided to disappear. Which was super convenient, since this post takes longer than half a week’s posts combined. So that was awesome for me. But again, look for This Week in Posters and Stills on Wednesdays. I’ll do my best to grab all the latest posters, one-sheets, set photos, promo stills and the occasional trailer where applicable, in the hopes of giving you a nice overview of the films that are out there, accompanied by my usual smartass captions to help the pill go down. PHEW! We clear now? Good.

DARK SHADOWS: Here’s the first of a big new batch of character posters from Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows. The consensus seems to be that this looks terrible (and generally speaking, trying to adapt cult stuff from 50 years ago that’s already been referenced many times since is a recipe for disaster), but… if you ask me, Dark Shadows looks better than most of Burton’s other recent output. I’ll take this over Frankweenie, for instance. I mean, everyone has super pale skin and ghostly lips, but… at least they’re not desaturated with occasional pops of red this time, right? Baby steps. As long as we view all future Tim Burton projects only in the context of other Tim Burton projects, he should be fine.

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Late yesterday afternoon Warner Bros released the trailer for Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows, which stars Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Eva Green, and Chloe Moretz (think unsexy thoughts, think unsexy thoughts…). Depp plays Barnabas Collins, an 18th Century playboy who, after breaking the heart of a witch, is turned into a vampire and buried alive, only to be accidentally awoken in 1972 by Jackie Earle Haley, who was in the midst of searching for the Collins family jewels in order to-zzzzzzzzzzzz. Whoa, I lost consciousness there for a second. Anyway, follow me after the jump for a trailer that sucks harder than a disco-era vampire. You guys, I’m kidding!

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Here we have the trailer for Frankenweenie, Tim Burton’s stop-motion remake of his own short from 1984 (not to be confused of course with Frankenpenis, a 1996 adult film starring John Wayne Bobbit). Featuring the vocal talents of Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short, Martin Landau, and Tom Kenny, it hits theaters October 5th, and it promises to be Tim Burton like you’ve never seen him before! …Hold on, I’m being handed a memo… Sorry, check that. It’s Tim Burton exactly how you’ve seen him before. Sorry for the confusion.

I can’t be the only one who thought that tail kind of looked like a creepy zombie penis.

“When you lose someone you love, they never really leave you, they just move into a special place in your heart. the ground.” Fixed!

Also, why is the dog all stitched together? Did they chop him up in pieces before they buried him? That’s dark, man.