Dark Shadows - Plot? What's a plot?

There was intense excitement at my workplace about 2 years ago when it became apparent that there was a large film crew on site constructing a series of sets that were barely visible from our car park.  A large crane appeared and intensely bright lights were visible long into the evening.  The loosely-kept 'secret' information about what was going on gradually seeped out from those in the know, apparently this was a Hollywood production.  Not just any old Hollywood production, but a Tim Burton film called Dark Shadows starring - obviously - Johnny Depp.  Depp generates a well-deserved level of excitement whenever he appears in anything, and no less so for this as rumours flew around the site as to when he would be here and where he was staying in the local area.  How much time he spent here is unknown, but when watching Dark Shadows there were scenes of the film that were clearly shot on our 'small roads system' here at TRL. Some of these scenes had Mr Depp in them, so he was clearly here at some point.  Yay us!

Sadly this was the most exciting thing about Dark Shadows.  At first I was worried that my constant vigilance for places and locations in the film that might have come from TRL was getting in the way of me following the story.  But soon I realised that this is a film without a story.  It does kind of have a premise though, which is that Depp plays Barnabas Collins - an 18th century man who is cursed to be a vampire for all eternity by a witch (Angelique Bouchard - played by Eva Green) whose advances he spurned for a lowly cleaning girl.  Barnabas is excavated from his living tomb in the 1970s and suddenly is thrown into the modern world, a world he doesn't understand.

And that's kind of it.  Angelique is now a successful business woman (apparently witches live forever too?) and the Collins' family are now wealthy land owners in the town.  So Barnabas seeks his family out, convinces them to take him in and then mooches around being confused by the 1970s until Angelique starts trying to seduce him again.  Then he falls in love with the modern equivalent of an 18th century cleaning girl and everything happens again.  I think that's it anyway.  At some point Barnabus tries to become human again, but that doesn't work.  Then for some reason it all ends in a big battle where statues come to life and Chloe Moretz is a werewolf and Helena Bonham Carter tries to be a vampire for some reason.  It's also got Michelle Pfeiffer in it, which just had me wondering when it was I last saw here on screen.  But she doesn't become a vampire.

It's a complete shambles of a film; a washed up gothic fantasy about tragic lovers, eye shadow, opulent hair, pale make-up and heaving bosoms with only the thinnest attempt at a plot or character arc.  Comic moments arising from Barnabas' misunderstandings of the modern world are few and fleeting.  Johnny Depp is an accomplished actor, but I think he needs to start reading Tim Burton's scripts before agreeing to be in absolutely everything he directs.

On the plus side though, I do like the Brady Bunch style poster I've stuck at the top of this post.