KEY POINTS:
Herald rating: * * * * *
Cast: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Sacha Baron Cohen
Director: Tim Burton
Rating: R16 (graphic violence)
Running time: 117 mins
Screening: SkyCity, Hoyts, Berkeley
Verdict: If you think the review's gushing, wait till you see the movie
Most folks couldn't whistle a song from a Stephen Sondheim musical if you held a cutthroat razor to their necks. Then, even devotees of the great man of American musical theatre would have trouble humming one without bruising their lips on the edges of his jagged melodies.
It's just one factor which makes this adaptation of his Broadway musical all the more remarkable.
If if non-singers Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter weren't able to breathe such life into such dissonant and baroque material, this Tim Burton adaptation of Sondheim's musical would have failed in every department, except maybe hair and make-up.
But they do and the result is bloody wonderful - and just plain bloody. So far as Broadway-to-screen adaptations go, this isn't a puff of Hairspray, but a gush of arterial. So be warned, when Depp's dastardly barber goes in for the cut, director Burton doesn't.
Just because they're singing doesn't mean we're spared the grim details of Todd's killing spree or his supply arrangement with Mrs Lovett (Bonham Carter) in the pie shop below.
But while the details are grisly, it's the black comedy of the piece and how the leads give voice to their consuming passions that makes this memorable for much more than its peculiar taste in pastries. The gothic-comic Burton is well suited to the Victorian London setting and knows what to play for laughs, like Sacha Baron Cohen's riotous turn as rival barber Pirelli.
Burton is no stranger to telling his stories through music either as he's shown with his animated Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride. And while traces may remain of its stage origins in its scenes, the theatricality of the songs is a perfect fit for the grandly gloomy world he creates which sometimes reminds of his Hammer Horror tribute, Sleepy Hollow.
When Depp gets a razor in each hand - "now my arm is complete," he sings - doesn't he remind of a troubled soul from a past Burton-Depp creation? Only this time the man with the blades has some serious issues. Revenge mainly, against the evil judge Turpin (Rickman) who sent him to the penal colony of Australia on trumped up charges and stole his wife and child.
Neither Depp or Bonham Carter have the greatest of voices but they still make their characters sing their little black hearts out. Bonham Carter makes her seemingly wicked widow a lovelorn romantic as well as the grotesque server of Shepherd's Pie - "with real shepherd".
And whether he's singing the lilting Pretty Girls in duet with Judge Turpin sitting in his barber's chair or making mincemeat of the rest of his clientele, Depp's performance shows what a true madman he can be.
