I think I may have sat through at max 5 minutes of the TV show before I got so bored I switched it off. A lot of critics have slammed this one, but it's got great use of music (though I don't see how the 15 year old daughter Carolyn could have been listening to Iggy and the Stooges' "Sick of You " in 1972 when it didn't come out until 1977), irreverent humor, and some smokin' hot babes. (Michelle Pfeiffer STILL looks sexy at 54.)
I would have liked to have seen more the idea of Barnabas Collins taking the high moral ground in a whirlpool of backstabbers and connivers but when he kills the psychiatrist (a slightly chunky Helena Bonham Carter with bright red hair and overisze glasses) who steals his blood so she can stay young forever under the pretense of giving him a transfusion in order to cure him (like in the book Dracula ) it kinda rings hollow.
Also the ending was completely by the book. It was a climax to a movie I've seen a million times, a big confrontation in front of a crowd, huge fight, house on fire. I got the feeling that after an hour and 40 minutes Tim Burton just decided to dial it in.
With that out of the way, the whole idea of a guy from the early nineteenth century waking up in 1972 and confronted with such weirdness as lava lamps and the Carpenters on TV is great subject matter. The fact that in the '70's everyone was so alienated and on drugs blurred the distinction between the undead and the living.
Even though Barnabas is a monster, and they don't try to shed a sympathetic light on him, he still has an innocence about him which the other characters lack.
Flawed but still not bad. And you gotta give props to Alice Cooper who plays at a party and he must be 60-something by now. "The ugliest woman I ever saw." with Jonathan Frid, Chloë Grace Moretz, Eva Green, Jackie Earle Haley (Rorschach in The Watchmen) and the never-retiring Christopher Lee.
