'Dark Shadows,' Katy Perry, 'Red Lights,' 'Holy Flying Circus' on home video
Dark Shadows
$35.99 (Blu-ray/DVD), Warner Home Video
Barnabas, they've done you proud. Ish.
Tim Burton's "Dark Shadows" starring Johnny Depp as reluctant bloodsucker Barnabas Collins hovers somewhere between a qualified success and a noble failure.
The first hour of Burton's horror comedy is positively sprightly good Gothic stuff, good laughs.
Before long, the joke an 18th-century vampire is mystified by the modernity of 1972 wears thin. It happens around the time Barnabas and his spurned arch-nemesis Angelique (Eva Green) get it on, as only a vampire and a witch can, to the accompaniment of Barry White's "You're the First, the Last, My Everything." By this point, we've already heard enough ironically juxtaposed '70s hits. Once the gag fizzles, Burton charges toward the FX-heavy climax, and "Dark Shadows" grows dim.
But the good is very good. The production design is sumptuous; the casting is savvy; Depp's performance is spellbinding. And Burton's film, however flawed, serves as an affectionate tribute to the wonky 1966-71 Gothic soap opera that inspired it.
As for whether the "Dark Shadows" faithful the Baby Boomers who ran home from school to watch the original on TV are happy with the liberties taken is another matter. Any humor in the original "Dark Shadows" was unintentional: flubbed dialogue, an errant fly, a crashing lamp. Perhaps these infamous bloopers YouTube them now validate the 2012 model's comedy. If the new "Dark Shadows" was just another horror remake like, say, 2010's dismal "The Wolfman," it would have been excruciating.
Instead, Burton presents a briskly edited Gothic prologue it views like highlights from a previous film detailing how, in the 1700s, Angelique drove Barnabas' lady love J! osette (Bella Heathcote) to leap from Widow's Hill, and cursed Barnabas with vampirism. Once unearthed in 1972, Barnabas comes face-to-face with a Wishnik doll, the "Operation" buzzer game, pot-smoking hippies and McDonald's. (Barnabas believes the golden arches represent Mephistopheles.)
He also meets his dysfunctional descendants, the Collins clan: gun-toting matriarch Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer), weaselly opportunist Roger (Jonny Lee Miller), wild child Carolyn (Chlo Grace Moretz) and two employees, drunken caretaker Willie (Jackie Earle Haley) and live-in shrink Dr. Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter in Fanta-orange hair).
Christopher Lee imbues "Dark Shadows" with vampire-movie cred in a cameo as a salty old seadog. Alice Cooper, playing himself, lip-syncs "The Ballad of Dwight Fry," which is ingeniously woven into a flashback montage.
Danny Elfman's understated (for once) score nods to Robert Cobert's indelible original, particularly in his use of xylophone and flute.
Extras include a making-of doc.
Katy Perry: Part of Me
$39.99 (Blu-ray/DVD), Paramount
What, exactly, is Katy Perry selling, and to who?
Perry whose audience is generously populated with prepubescent girls wears racy costumes adorned with candy-themed iconography; her stage is decorated with lollipops; and she cavorts onstage with "Kitty Purry," a dancer dressed as a plush toy.
Perry may not wear B&D garb like Madonna, but she tarts it up nonetheless; Perry has replaced Madonna's infamous "cone" bra with Hershey's Kisses pull-strings and all.
Call me a prude; it comes off like sexualization of children's entertainment.
This infomercial for Perry becomes affecting when exploring Perry's Pentecostal roots and the disintegration of her marriage to! Russell ! Brand.
But try not to snicker when, just before making a dramatic stage entrance via a hydraulic lift, Perry fights back tears while pinwheels spin on her breasts.
Red Lights
$28.99 (DVD), Millennium
Everything you need to know about "Red Lights," and Robert De Niro's commitment to the project, are encapsulated in his introductory scene, an unintentionally telling one.
When De Niro, as celebrity medium Simon Silver, steps from an airplane onto the waiting airstairs, he removes his dark glasses, revealing "blind eye" contact lenses.
Ooh! Simon Silver is blind!
(You can practically hear De Niro mentally count to three before putting the glasses back on.)
This bit of business is performed so transparently, with De Niro's obliging collaboration, that you know you're in trouble.
But you knew it already. You knew it from the 007-esque pre-credits sequence, which establishes Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy as Ghostbusters without the proton guns. More evidence follows. "Red Lights" is set in a universe where the media covers the paranormal scene with a fervor reserved for presidential elections. When Weaver's Dr. Margaret Matheson bombs on a TV chat show, her appearance garners front-page headlines.
In accompanying cast interviews, Weaver, Murphy and even De Niro struggle to justify their participation in this stinker.
Holy Flying Circus
$34.95 (Blu-ray/DVD), Acorn Media
An earnest docudrama that depicts the behind-the-scenes machinations of England's celebrated comedy troupe, Monty Python's Flying Circus.
This, t! hank good! ness, ain't "Holy Flying Circus."
Instead, the British TV movie is quite Python-esque itself, sometimes out-Pythoning the real Pythons via cutaway skits, drag, multiple roles for its stars and other sundry silliness.
And yet, "HFC" somehow turns dramatic, even ponderous. The British TV movie centers on the controversy surrounding the Pythons' 1979 film, "Life of Brian," which drew protests for its religious humor.
"HFC" becomes touching in its scenes between John Cleese (Darren Boyd), taciturn to the point of unknowable, and Michael Palin (Charles Edwards), who initially resists defending "Life of Brian" against detractors. Edwards' Palin eventually concludes that it is his duty to argue for comedy as a vital social tradition.
These scenes feel real, but "HFC" never loses its whimsy. Palin's wife is played by Rufus Jones (who also plays Terry Jones) in drag. Sounds ludicrous; works like a charm. James Laurenson is appropriately draconian as an archbishop who appears on a talk show in full regalia, leading Boyd to remark: "Are we expecting vampires?"
Mark Voger can be reached HERE.