Tim Burton does what he does best to deliver a story that's a little bit creepy, a whole lot funny, heavily stylised, beautifully produced yet faintly unsatisfying. In his eighth collaboration with Johnny Depp, Burton draws down a case load of inspiration – Straw Dogs, Hammer Horror and perhaps Murder She Wrote as he sets about, unusually for him, adapting a 1970's TV programme which sits somewhere between Beetlejuice and The Addams Family.

Barnabus Collins (Johnny Depp) learns that hard way about the wrath of a woman scorned. Bad luck for him that she also happens to be a witch. For his troubles, Angelique (Eva Green) turns him into a vampire, binds him in chains and buries him alive. Or dead, technically. He is dug up some two hundred years later, and in 1972 discovers the family fortune has been usurped and a ragtag bunch of relatives is living in the ancestral home. While more than a touch confused by this new world, with the help of his leftover family and hangers-on, he seeks revenge.

There are some ancillary themes about anxious love, kids who see dead people and the unexpected arrival of a werewolf, but Burton is not much interested in trifles like subplot and lets most of these lapse freely. There's much more fun to be had with Collins as he acquaints himself with a new age, and the relatives forced to embrace a demon in their midst. A stranger two centuries out of touch is the perfect vehicle for Depp's dry comic touch with Michelle Pfieffer's icy family matron, Helena Bonham Carter's alcoholic psychiatrist and Green's vixen all perfect foils. There's a heightened camp about this vamp.

Dark Shadows is, largely, business as usual for both Burton and Depp who reworks his Jack Sparrow channelling Michael Jackson kick. And while there aren't many surprises in a routine script that runs out of steam in the second half, the setting is delicious and laughs flow freely (Collins' encounter with Karen Carpenter is a highlight). As muddled as Mars Attacks! this is no Edward Scissorhands yet it's streets ahead of Alice in Wonderland and for that we can all be grateful.

// COLIN FRASER
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