Sweeney Todd is a barber in 19th century London seeking revenge on the evil judge that stole his wife and sent him to a penal colony for 15 years and is now killing various London miscreants. He performs these acts in his barber shop rented from the second story of Nellie Lovett's pie shop on Fleet Street. She makes the "worst pies in London" and uses the remains of Todd's victims as a new source of high quality protein in her pies. He kills them in his barber chair and pulls a lever lowering the chair back and dropping them down a trapped door to the basement near the furnace. The angles work out that all the victims land upside-down on the tops of their head. Each and every time we're shown the shot of the bodies landing and crunching like rag dolls. I found this shot somehow hilarious, and it's a good thing since we're shown it about 8 times. I laughed out loud each and every time.
It's also about the only thing I really loved in Tim Burton's film based on the Broadway play by Stephen Sondheim. It has the dark washed out look and the overdone makeup (making even the living characters look ghostly) of a Burton film and stars Burton regulars Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter as Todd and Lovett. Alan Rickman makes a good Judge Turpin and Sasha Baron Cohen is a competitor barber with a young assistant. There's also a Romeo and Juliet star-crossed young lovers subplot.
There is a lot of blood in a Monty Python squirting kind of way and against the washed out tones it really comes across looking like thick red nail polish. Murder, cannibalism, rape, pedophilia, etc. Sounds like the stuff for a musical doesn't it? There is plenty of singing and it's mostly fine, though I found the tunes all unmemorable. I'm not sure if the songs advanced the plot or slowed it down, probably both. It's dark but goes more for tragedy than fun (well except for the falling bodies) and didn't really come together as a film.
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