Dark Shadows, Seven magazine review Dir: Tim Burton; Starring: Johnny Depp, Eva Green, Michelle Pfeiffer Dark Shadows, Tim Burton's take on a little-known Gothy US television serial, takes a while to find its mojo. There's a lot of backstory involving lost loves and jumping off cliffs, and a lot of Rick Heinrichs" production design: not since Batman has the filmmaker had so overwhelmingly cavernous a set to play on. Matters are enlivened - inevitably, this being Burton - with the arrival of the living dead: Johnny Depp's cold-fish vampire Barnabas Collins (above), reawakened in 1972 to be bamboozled by Karen Carpenter and lava lamps alike. Cue a silly, garbled, blast-from-the-past plot. The twisted storytelling seems almost the point. As the frenzied couplings of Depp's nosferatu and his white-witch lover Eva Green insinuate, close to the film's surface pulses a vein of counter-commercial perversity. Barnabas's return is also that of the director who once amused himself making Mars Attacks! from bubblegum trading cards. Here again, ephemerality vanquishes immortality, yet Dark Shadows offers the week's best Scooby-Doo joke, its choicest rock star cameo (from Alice Cooper), and its brightest salmon-pink explosion. And I'll take these sparks, however fleeting, over Burton's pallid 3D Alice any day.