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It's movie review week on SCG Daily. Today's feature is a Tim Burton special – the Corpse Bride. I'll review the movie, then create a theme deck based on the movie. The big question: Can the deck be worse than the movie?
Tim Burton lives to produce quirky movies – things that bend the limits. In many cases, his characters are weird but oddly lovable – Edward Scissorhands, for example. Other times the main character is effectual, but in a strange way, as in Big Fish or even Batman. Some main characters are capable but obsessed or twisted, like Jack Skellington in Nightmare before Christmas. And sometimes the main characters are just odd and quirky, like Ed Wood.
Unfortunately, the main character in this movie is more along the lines of Ed Wood than Jack Skellington or Batman.
In other respects, the movie looks like Nightmare before Christmas II. The same animation style is used, and this movie also has a cast of rotting corpses doing song-and-dance numbers. The world of the dead is, like Halloween town, far more interesting than the real world. Even the female lead – at least the dead one – is reminiscent of the leaf-stuffed girl in Nightmare.
Where the film falls flat, compared to Nightmare, is that the villains and secondary characters in Corpse Bride are not as interesting as, and far shallower than, those in Nightmare. The villain, a scheming baron who wants to marry for money, is no Oogie Boogie. The secondary characters include the rather hollow living bride and the totally cliché parents on both side. They don't hold a candle to Nightmare's supporting cast, like the mad scientist duck or the pissed-off Santa Claus.
The basic plot of Corpse Bride is that the bride and groom are going to be part of an arranged marriage, but the groom can't get through the rehearsal. He wanders off to practice and accidentally get married to the corpse of a bride-to-be murdered years before. The hero descends to the underworld, which seems to be something left over from a Broadway version of a Dickens story.
That said, the movie has a style all its own. Some of the dialog is well written, and the sight gags are not too bad… If rather adolescent. The movie has moments where it actually shatters clichés in smart ways – for example, the scene where the dead come back to the life and meet the villagers – but there were just not quite enough of these moments to make it a great movie. It's probably a decent date movie – it's cutesy and quirky enough to appeal to your date (moreso than, say, Doom) and to talk about as you leave the movie, but not enough to distract her later in the evening.
So, enough review – time to make the movie into a deck. To make this playable, while staying in theme, let's make it a Reanimator deck.
Reanimation effects:
1 Life / Death
1 Living Death
2 Dance of the Dead
1 Animate Dead
1 Corpse Dance
2 Reanimate
1 Miraculous Recovery
Graveyard filler and Props:
2 Entomb
2 Buried Alive
2 Cemetery Gate
1 Black Carriage
1 Funeral Charm
2 Dark Ritual
1 Wicked Reward (offing the villain)
1 Undertaker
The cast / the dead people:
1 Coffin Queen (the Corpse Bride)
1 Akroma, Angel of Wrath (who cares about theme – what else would you want to reanimate?)
1 Avatar of Woe (the living bride – not perfect casting, but a good card)
1 Mind Maggot (the Peter Lorre worm – also a method of filling the graveyard)
1 Withered Wretch
1 Carrionette
1 Revenant
1 Necrosavant
I could include a lot of marginal cards for the rest of the cast (Cackling Witch's art is okay for the bride's father and Harvest Mage for the mother), but the cards are just really bad. If you really want to play this deck, you can strike your own balance between cards that match the movie and cards that are actually playable.
Tomorrow – reviewing in the world of sequels.
