Rating: 4/5

READING the notes I scribbled during the screening of Dark Shadows are a reminder of the weirdness of trying to turn a late 1960s daytime supernatural soap into a movie for 2012.

They read: birthing hips, The Carpenters – woodworkers, weird swinging London thing, Love Story (the Erich Segal book), vampire and witch sex, a happening, Alice Cooper.

Nobody does weird like director Tim Burton, especially with Johnny Depp (and another funny accent) by his side for their eighth collaboration.

Burton has spoken about the “elusive tone” of the original series and there are times when he seems to be struggling to find the right one as he combines fish-out-of-water comedy (a 200-year-old vampire at large in the 1970s), special-effects-driven supernatural horror and a love story.

The back story – man rejects witch, witch makes man’s true love walk off a cliff, man jumps too and becomes a vampire, then he’s buried alive (if you can call the undead alive) by torch-bearing locals.

Fast forward two centuries when Barnabas Collins (Depp) is woken up and visits his relatives who’ve fallen on hard times in their dilapidated mansion.

They make the Addams family look like the Waltons – stressed mother (Michelle Pfeiffer), troublesome teen (Chloe Grace Moretz), disturbed ten-year-old son (Gully McGrath), thieving brother (Jonny Lee Miller).

No wonder they have a live-in psychiatrist (Helena Bonham Carter), I should mention that the new nanny (Bella Heathcote) is the spitting image of Barnabas’s true love. Which is unfortunate as witch Angelique (Eva Green), who put the curse on Barnabas after he rejected her, is the most powerful woman in town and determined to win the vampire for herself.

There’s an awful lot going on and while a TV series would allow characters to develop episode by episode, a two-hour movie means several family members remain virtually unexplored.

This doesn’t spoil the fun – and more than anything else this latest Burton/Depp collaboration is good, occasionally chaotic, fun. The culture clash between an 18th Century vampire and the anythinggoes Seventies produces some good laughs, but doesn’t overplay them. We get to see what sex between a vampire and a witch is like (and I’m glad I don’t have to clean up afterwards), and Pfeiffer blasts all and sundry with a shotgun.

Eva Green is dangerously sexy as Angelique, the ultimate woman scorned, but a thoughtful one who puts a pair of her knickers on Barnabas’s face as she locks him in a coffin.

The final confrontation offers a blitz of fire and special effects although the arrival of a werewolf (strayed in from Twilight perhaps) is a creature too far.

The ending would seem to signal a sequel. Dead men – and women – do live to tell tales.