Dark Shadows Pics Revealed, or Why Tim Burton Must Be Stopped

Some production stills from the Tim Burton film treatment of Dark Shadows starring Johnny Depp, have very recently surfaced on the intertubes, and just one image can bring on a whole bag of ughhh to the ribcage! In the first place, they've made Johnny Depp look precisely what Elliott from ET: The Extra Terrestrial would like if he had gone goth and become a recluse in a secluded New England castle. Furthermore, these images serve as a reminder of why the remake is an awful idea, why Tim Burton is a terrible filmmaker these days, and what a waste of talent it is to see Johnny Depp play these kinds of roles.

A flurry of emotions gobsmacked me across the chaw when I saw these photos. Not because of how they looked or even what they were of, but that the Dark Shadows project encapsulates so many things worth hating about Hollywood right now. So, let's get them all out before I show you the other still.

Someone needs to take Tim Burton's camera and notepads away. He's run out of original ideas and we're sick and goddamned tired of watching him filch source material only to make it worse. From Alice In Wonderland to Planet Of The Apes to Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, he's taken good things and sullied them with his deliberate weirdness and pseudo-gothic bullshit.

The Dark Shadows television program doesn't even hold any allure to me and yet I still feel like he's ruining it. There is a sense that Burton has this cadre of things he loves and wants to control, so he remakes them. Yet, this only leads to an inferior version of the thing he loved. It is sad to watch and damaging to the source material. Someone make him stop.

Johnny Depp is a very talented actor and yet he keeps palling around with Burton hoping to rekindle that Edward Scissorhands or Ed Wood magic. Those are very good films, but that light has long since gone out and now one gets the sens that Depp will play out his days as Jack Sparrow in a rest home, doing the bidding of the evil Dr. Burton or, after the failure of Rum Punch, perhaps just continue making bad film adaptations of Hunter S. Thompson novels. Dude, just get back to being an actor and stop trying to be a movie star.

Finally, we get down to the whole vampire nonsense. Between this, the Underworld franchise, Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter and that Twilight Saga bullshit, the American movie making syndicate have basically created a cottage industry for fake blood purveyors and the makers of prosthetic fangs. At what point will the movie going public overload on this horseshit? It's hard to tell what teenage girls will be into next, but anything other than bloodsucking douchebags would be a wonderful reprieve for this cineaste.

Enough of my vitriol, here are some more stills.