It’s always been a selling point of film that in it anything can happen to anyone. No one is safe from love, death, time travel, mystical beasts or dreary family drama. Yet there is a particular and unique allure to the horrific, films where innocence makes you a target. This sort of terrorist logic, where there are no non-combatants, gives us an awed sense of fright and perhaps having it on the screen has kept it feeling distant. The Freddy Krueger’s, killing kids like heads of cattle for no reason, perhaps made us feel a layer of safety beneath the window rattling fright, “It’s just a movie.”

As films have become more obsessively and meticulously violent, reflecting and perpetuating real life trends, we’ve all become the protagonists in our own potential horror films. If the evening news is to be believed we’re all on the business end of a riflescope, whenever we step out to go to the mall, school or church. From across the seas come religious terrorist, domestically we grow nihil psychotics with easy access to weapons. To all of these we’re just so much ballast and potential gore.

How are the movies to keep up with reality?

That’s a question best asked of Tim Burton, who has adapted the Steven Sondheim play “Sweeny Todd” into an outlandishly dour and evil film. As a play Todd was a mix between Thomas Hardy, Jonathan Swift and Gilbert and Sullivan, peppered liberally with a blasé, boutique sort of cynicism about the ubiquity of callousness, and its innovative gore even brought a satiric smile in the face of its living absurdity.

      The main Character, Sweeny Todd, is a barber in nineteenth century London whose charmed life, beautiful wife and baby daughter has drawn the jealousy of an a-moral judge, a character straight out of De Sade. He frames Todd for a crime and sends him to prison. The judge then sets about first attempting to seduce, then failing that, raping Todd’s wife.

      As we meet the barber he is returning to London after fifteen years in prison. He tells his story to a fellow passenger on his ship and we see the changes in the man from flashback to current.

      Returning to his fleet street haunts, he sets up shop in his old establishment above a failing restaurant run by Mrs. Lovett, a macabre caricature of desperation, not unlike her physical surroundings. Here he  hatches his plan to have his revenge on the judge; since he (Todd) is the best barber in London it will be little problem to lure so vein a man as the judge in for a shave and once under Todd’s razor the judge will be dispatched.

      The music in the film is some of Sondheim’s best work. And the staging by Burton and his crew shows an intuitive understanding of musical story telling. Burton of course is a set piece fetishist. And in this film his greatest set piece is murder and depravity. Which, as his entries in the Batman series show, suits him just fine.

      Sweeny eventually flips out completely, blaming the whole world for his troubles -how many times have we been exposed to this sort of justification in the face of a real pile of bodies- and goes about killing any who come alone to his shop. The blood and aplomb with which Burton dispatches of these disposable persons is nearly operatic. Once their throats are cut they are ushered backward in the mechanized barber chair, down a chute to the basement two levels below, where they each hit the stone floor with ghastly sounds of bodily burble and cracking. The bodies are butchered and made into meat pies, which are sold by Mrs. Lovett, to revivifying effect on her restaurant.

      Film is bound to take any subject one step removed from its source. Where as the play felt like a closed circuit allegory; the ease of viewing of the film calluses the experience and turns comment into comic gore. You are forced to wonder as you’re viewing, “Who else is seeing this?” Will all who see the ease with which Sweeny dispatches his victims take it lightly as an exercise in style? Or will it fall on some eyes as a hymn of praise to their darkest revenge fantasies?

      There is an awkward undercurrent of humanity in “Sweeny Todd,” one the film seems to view as a burden, some vestigial limb left over from arcane entertainments. So we are given a love story between Todd’s daughter, stolen and raised by his nemesis the judge, and the friend from the boat. Their coupling is coincidence and neither knows that they are connected through the demon barber. But this subplot is only used as much as it must be to move the barber’s story along and is not even given the courtesy of conclusion. The last shot is, appropriately, of death and ruin. Which, in a world like this film inhabits, is all the lovers can hope for.

      The performances and set design of “Sweeny Todd” are triumphs of burlesque. Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Helena Bonham Carter and Sascha Baron Cohen all vamp and pose like grotesques on a vaudeville stage, which is perfect to the atmosphere of the movie. But even as burlesque, the film is less than enjoyable for being so oppressively dark and as pure entertainment it is a bit too similar to an edition of the eleven o’clock news to cash in as fun.