Sadly, my mom is visiting and wants to see this for Mother's Day

if ever there was a case for matricide.

The Washington Post gave it one and half stars (out of four) - I'm afraid to actual read what they didn't like, but I still want to see this, maybe at a cheap matinee price - but not full price.

Tell her you hope she has a good time.

It's not a comedy. The trailer cherry-picked every joke that was sprinkled throughout the film and put them together. And the trailer is much, much better than the final product.

So is it more of a serious horror flick/soap opera (like the TV show)? If so, I might have to check it out.

How was Jonathan Frid's cameo?

Ouch, because the trailer sucked.

Not worth seeing for the Alice cameo? I'm sure it's brief anyway.

Indeed it did. What made it worse was the bait-n-switch during the first 40 seconds. Before it switched the shitastic comedy mode, I thought I was gonna see the Dark Shadows movie I always wanted.

The best part was seeing the Prometheus and The Dark Knight Rises trailer, oh and Eva Green's cleavage on the IMAX screen. Supermallet did you run the IMAX screening last night? It was pretty dead in there.

I might still watch this but will wait until it hits the $2 theater.

So if it's not a comedy, or a horror in the traditional sense, what is it? A goth-horror-comedy, a horror drama with bits of comedy, or is it such a meandering mess of a movie it has no clue what it is itself?

It's not scary, it's not funny, it is melodramatic, but not in the fun way that the show was. The cameos are all at the ball IIRC, and they're very quick. It is absolutely a mess. Grahame-Smith has no clue what to do with all of these characters. Consequently, most are ignored until the plot needs them, but the audience has no connection to them. The only ones who come out of this looking good at all are Pfeiffer and Green.

The movie is just bad. It's sad that a multi-million dollar superstar film can't muster up the atmosphere that a 60's soap opera did five times a week on a shoestring budget.

I had planned on seeing this because I didn't think it looked too bad but the reviews are making me second think it. I might just wait until it's on Blu-ray. There was a time when I would have put Burton as one of my favorite directors. I wish he'd branch out and do different projects instead of everything being a goth themed movie starring Johnny Depp and a score by Danny Elfman. I also think that the last movie I enjoyed from him a lot was Sleepy Hollow. After that his stuff has been mostly miss for me (with exception to Big Fish). I think he has it in him to make a good film but he always falls back on the same stuff over and over. It just gets old.

Damn. That's such a shame.

and this is the writer who scripted 'Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter' and 'Pride and Prejudice with Zombies' - this doesn't bode well.

a little blurb, jab from the Washington Post review: "There's little by way of a story in "Dark Shadows," which instead works as a glib, if attractively atmospheric, collage of winks and references."

Super, how does it stack up against Charlie and Alice? I didn't find either of those awful (as I said before I accept them as paycheck films) but I was hoping this would at least be a bit better...

He wrote those books as well.

Worse than Charlie, better than Alice. Charlie had a few interesting ideas that differentiated it from the original film. Alice was an abomination from the depths of hell. Dark Shadows is just a boring, meandering mess.

Either Supermallet is the only one to see it or others are too embarrassed to admit it

Since he wrote the books, as RichC2 mentioned, I imagine those will have much stronger scripts than this one did.

I saw it (in a packed theater, no less), and thought it was very good. Different tastes, I guess. And FWIW, the audience all seemed to have a great time as well.

Just curious, were you a fan of the TV show?

I'll see it on down the line, when the ticket price actually goes to the theater and NOT the studio ...

Yep. In my neighborhood, my house was "the" place to watch it every day after school. I usually had 7 or 8 friends over.

So two fans of the show. One hated the movie and the other liked it. As another fan of the show (and the short-live '91 revival series with Ben Cross), colour me conflicted.