(2007) It's awfully bloody … awfully bloody wonderful. Director Tim Burton takes Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's Broadway horror-and-humor musical and translates it (adaptation by Christopher Bond) from stage to screen, with music (actors not known for singing roles), melodrama, and makeup (pale faces with dark sunken eyes) that put me in mind of a marriage of Phantom of the Opera and Corpse Bride.

"There's a hole in the world like a great black pit/ And the vermin of the world inhabit it/ And its morals aren't worth what a pig could spit/ And it goes by the name of London," Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp) murmurs morosely as he departs The Bountiful with Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower), a young sailor.

Fifteen years earlier he'd been Benjamin Barker, a barber with a beautiful wife and a precious girlchild, before "a pious vulture of the law," Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), sent him to prison on false charges in order to take advantage of Lucy (Laura Michelle Kelly), "poor thing."

With his thick black mane, set off by a white streak flowing backward from his forehead, and eyes with death circles dwelling in a ghostly face, Todd returns to his former residence on Fleet Street above Mrs Lovett's meat-pie shop, where she (Helena Bonham Carter) serves him one of the worst pies in London. Remembering the long-ago tenant for whom she always held a fondness, Mrs Lovett relates how Lucy poisoned herself to evade the judge's grasp; however, the daughter, Johanna (Jayne Wisener), has become a caged bird in his house.

She has also saved Todd's razors, which smile in the light as he gleefully takes them up, calling them his friends, with which he will have his revenge: "You shall drip precious rubies."

Meanwhile, Anthony has espied the pretty blonde in the window of Judge Turpin's apartments; warned never to show his face again ("You gandered at her," accuses the judge), Anthony vows: "I'll steal you."

In public, calling him a fraud of "piss and ink," Todd challenges Signor Adolfo Pirelli (Sacha Baron Cohen), a mountebank selling a miracle elixir for hair growth, to a tonsorial duel, requesting Beadle Bamford (Timothy Spall) to judge the winner. Later Pirelli appears at Todd's exiguous parlor, where after recognizing Todd as Barker and demanding half of the barber's earnings as blackmail, he becomes Todd's first victim.

When Judge Turpin confides his intention to marry his young ward, Johanna, "a pretty little rosebud," the beadle recommends Sweeney Todd, for a woman better appreciates a clean-shaven man for her groom. First fortune smiles, then she frowns. Just as Todd is about to lay his razor to the judge's throat - "a shave," says Turpin, "The closest I ever gave," replies Todd - Anthony bursts into the room.

Angry over the judge's escaping his fate, Todd decides: "They all deserve to die. I will have vengeance … salvation." One hundred deaths can't assuage his bottomless disappointment. Wondering what to do with the corpses, Mrs Lovett hits upon the solution: Men are devouring each other outside, so why not inside as well?

As her pie shop prospers, she tries to convince Todd to compromise between the life she dreamed of with him and the one he remembered.

Having become aware of Johanna's deceit and intention of eloping with Anthony, Turpin sends her to Old Bailey to be confined in the madhouse. When the law is evil, one may choose to act above or below it. With each gory slitting of a throat, I gasped but then guffawed as the body passed down the chute, crumpling on the basement floor below.

In the pie shop Toby (Edward Sanders), a lad formerly with Pirelli now employed by the gentle Mrs Lovett, promises to protect her from Todd, whom the boy suspects of treachery. Similarly an old beggar woman believes there's evil where the chimney smells foul and demands the beadle make an inspection of the bake house.

I also enthusiastically recommend the 1982 TV version of the musical, directed by Terry Hughes and Harold Prince, with Angela Lansbury as Nellie Lovett and George Hearn as Sweeney Todd.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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