10 Trailers That Were Better Than The Film

The trailer for Dark Shadows is very funny. There's great jokes about being stoned and tiny songstresses, a cool soundtrack, raunchy vampire sex, and Johnny Depp being weird, which annoys a lot of people nowadays but I'm of the opinion that if you're good at something you should probably keep doing it. But the Dark Shadows trailer is guilty of doing what so many other comedies have done before, and that is, to put it simply, showing all of the film's best jokes, which is just like an action film showing all of its best stunts and explosions.

The story for Dark Shadows is nothing special - it's a typical fish-out-of-water narrative that we've seen time and time again - so the film lived and died by its ability to be funny. However, when all of the funny bits have been shown to us in the trailers and TV spots, which in our digital generation are increasingly difficult to fully avoid, it means that when these once funny jokes appear they are no longer funny, even if there is added context.

So, by the time that Johnny Depp's vampire in the '60s tells his weed joke again it's a bit like when that distant family member that you only see at gatherings tells you the same damn joke that you've heard tens of times before. The only difference is when you've paid £10 for a ticket you don't feel obliged to chuckle anymore.