Halloween Horrors: SWEENEY TODD

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET  (2007)
Directed by Tim Burton
Starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Jamie Campbell Bower, Jayne Wisener, Ed Sanders, Laura Michelle Kelly, Sacha Baron Cohen
R for graphic bloody violence.
SCAREmeter: 6.5/10
GOREmeter: 10/10
OVERALL: 4 out of 4 stars

From 1897 to 1962, Le Theatre du Grand-Guignol, best known simply as the Grand Guignol [/gēnˈyôl/], in Paris, France specialized in grisly, naturalistic horror plays that utilized notoriously graphic blood/gore-related special effects.  Today, its name is directly associated with sensationally amoral, graphically gross horror, and there are few films that so perfectly represent what "Grand Guignol entertainment" can be like Tim Burton's cinematic adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim stage musical, SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET.

Sweeney Todd- Accomplished barber and murder

Benjamin Barker was an innocent and accomplished barber in Victorian London, happily married to his wife, Lucy (Laura Michelle Kelly), with a newborn daughter, Johanna, but another man, Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) coveted Barker's life and so had him arrested on false charges.  Torn away from his wife and child, Barker was condemned to a life of indentured servitude, and after fifteen years, escaped to return to London as a new man, forged in the merciless fires of Hell, Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp).  Soon after sailing into London harbor with the young sailor who spotted him at sea, Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower), Mr. Todd returns to his old shop in the quarters above Mrs. Lovett's Pie Shop.  There, Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) informs him of how Judge Turpin raped Lucy and she poisoned herself, leaving Turpin to adopt, or rather, capture Johanna (played as a teenager by Jayne Wisener), and keeps her under close guard.  Todd reopens his shop, waiting for the day when the Judge will come walking into his premises for a shave, at which point, Todd will slash open his throat.  During the course of setting the trap for the judge however, Mr. Todd and Mrs. Lovett become collaborators in a serial murder scheme, in which Todd slices the throats of customers "who won't be missed," and via his ingenious barber chair which tips backward in to trap door, dumps the bodies into the basement bake-house below, where Mrs. Lovett, whose business is struggling under the price of meat, puts the victims' bodies through her meat grinder to make savory pies.  Low and behold, their murder-cannibalistic enterprise proves to be a highly lucrative one, taking Mrs. Lovett's meat pies from being the worst to being the best pies in London.  Meanwhile, Todd's sailor friend, Anthony has discovered Johanna through her bedroom window (unaware of her relation to Todd), and hopes to steal her away with Todd's assistance, providing Todd with the opportunity he so desires to draw Turpin in.
SWEENEY TODD is a superb smorgasbord of depravity from start to finish, with wanton murder and unwitting cannibalism, sexual assault in the midst of a gawking crowd, implied pedophilia, child abuse, pornography, human flesh oozing out like ground beef from a meat grinder, etc.  It is the Victorian London of our darkest and most stylish nightmares, and better yet, set to musical numbers.  All the actors do their own singing, which, while not necessarily contributing to a professional album quality, matches each character perfectly, especially Depp's Academy Award-nominated performance, whose singing is polished just enough but with a rougher quality.  Last year's LES MISERABLES similarly had major actors do their own singing, although that cast (with one notable exception) was already made up of accomplished singers and still had rougher qualities mixed in, although not to such great effect as SWEENEY TODD.

Judge Turpin- Rapist and pornography aficionado

As is typically the case with Tim Burton's films, the production design is a very strong point, designed by Dante Ferretti (what an awesome name to go with it), a regular on Martin Scorcese's productions and on Pier Paolo Pasolini's later films.  The film is almost entirely composed of black, blue and grey tones with intermittent explosions of bright, vibrant red, filmed on desaturated color film stock.  The sets are Gothic and ominous, the most prominent being Todd's barbershop, a simple, dark room with a broken mirror and the chair, with one wall at an incline with one large window to let in the moonlight.  It's a London out of a penny dreadful illustration and colored in morose oils.  In particular, I love the CGI opening credits sequence, which opens with the studio logos as booming pipe organ music plays, then moves down in on the barbershop as blood splatters on the shop window and the camera flies down into the gruesome bake-house, with a look emulating an elaborate old illustration.  There is one sequence, By the Sea, that is prominently differentiated from the rest, in which Mrs. Lovett elaborates on her fantasies about a quaint family life with Mr. Todd by the seashore, still desaturated, but also garish.  That one scene is very strange, more distinguishable as "Burton-esque" than the rest of the film, which mostly trades in the weird for the macabre.
There's no one who could see the film and not mention the blood, which is probably the most apparent characteristic.  It's highly stylized, a mix a KILL BILL blood geysers and the thick, red paint-like fake blood of Hammer Horror films.  It's actually very infrequent right up until around the second half, at which point it becomes increasingly gratuitous in the best way.  Sweeney slices open the throats of his victims carefully and deliberately in most cases, perhaps an effort by Depp to properly cut open the pressurized hose-filled neck prosthetics used for the effects, and the bright red blood gushes from the lacerations with ridiculous pressure.  One particular kill is magnificently bloody even by the standards set by the rest of the film, with Todd stabbing the straightedge razor into the man's neck multiple times, spurting and spraying blood all over Todd's face and clothes and splattering onto the window, before he finally slices the neck across with a swift stroke, spraying a high-pressure fan of blood.  Reportedly, the fake blood used on set was actually a fluorescent orange that would then show up as the proper shade of garish red on the desaturated color film.
It's a seething, Gothic musical of a very peculiar sort, effectively frightening and gleefully disgusting in a way that all other gory horror films seem to miss completely and are instead sadistic torture porn.  SWEENEY TODD toys with bad taste in ways that no one wants to condone, but the dark side of our imagination finds stimulating, as long as it remains in an acceptable level of fantasy.  SWEENEY TODD is Tim Burton's best movie.