Just a quick FYI: I've heard that Battleship is absolutely terrible, so instead of going to see Battleship I went to see Dark Shadows today.

Johnny Depp plays an English Man named Barnabas Collins who gets turned into a vampire by a jealous witch. 200 years later he wakes up to find that his family is falling apart and the family business has turned to crap. He sets out to fix the family's woes by reuniting the family, restoring the business, and contend with the witch that cursed him who is- for no reason that is ever explained in the film- still alive 200 years later.

The good news is that the film is fairly funny. The movie basically plays out like a list of good fish-out-of-water and vampire jokes; plus Johnny Depp is his traditional over-the-top self, which is always fun to watch.

The bad news is that the movie has almost no story to speak of. The film's opening line is that blood is thicker than water, and the film straight-out says that it's all about the importance of family. Out of all of the family members: a mother, an uncle, a daughter, a nephew, a psychologist, a butler, and a governess; all of them have five to ten minutes of screen time each. The film says that it's going to talk about the importance of family, and then the family is barely in the movie. Heck; one of the conflicts that is set up at the start of the film- the mother's inability to relate with or control her rebellious teenage daughter- is never developed or built upon though the rest of the movie.

The entire movie is pretty much a one-man show of Barnabas, and even he doesn't have much of a story. He falls in love with the governess, but they only have four extremely brief scenes together and their romance isn't developed at all until the end of the movie when they end up together. Barnabas struggles with the fact that he must kill to survive, but after going through a scene where he says that he's struggling with the fact that he must kill to survive that fundamental internal conflict is scarcely mentioned again. The film sort of kind of hints that Barnabas is going to become a father figure to the nephew of the family, and then that subtext is completely dropped from the movie. Most of the movie is Barnabas telling the witch- who is the most two-dimensional villain I have ever seen- to go screw herself and the witch in turn reminding us that she's evil. You'd think that she would've found something better to do for 200 years than hold a grudge against her old flame, but nope; 200 years later she has still devoted her life to destroying a man that she already turned into a vampire so that he'd be alone for the rest of his life.

Here's probably the prime example of the movie's awful storytelling. One of the main characters is a werewolf. The fact that said character is a werewolf is not even remotely hinted at until the absolute end of the movie when the werewolf literally jumps out of nowhere. I know that this was directed by Tim Burton and storytelling isn't always his strong suit, but that's just amateurish. I suppose that I should have called spoiler alert, but the fact that one of the main characters is a werewolf has absolutely nothing- and I mean NOTHING- to do with the film's story.

Dark Shadows is funny, but that's all that it is. The film makes you laugh because it has Johnny Depp being an over-the-top Johnny Depp, but there's nothing to recommend about the film besides that. I say wait to rent it.