Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

I'm not sure why this film makes me laugh so much. I should be terrified, appalled by everything in this film, and yet I sit and laugh and am happy at the end. This original playwright, for those of you who have never heard of this movie, is about a barber, who lives on the second floor, who murders people and sends their bodies to the basement, where the lady who owns the pie shop below  Mr. Sweeney Todd's barber shop bakes the humans into meat pies. It all happens, one because Todd, who is actually Benjamin Barker, needs to murder someone because he needs to get his rage out because he missed his chance at murdering the man who stole his wife and child and exiled him from the country. Two, meat is very expensive and Mrs. Lovett, the owner of the meat pie shop, needs to make business. She remembers Mr. Barker and is in love with him, so they concoct this idea and make a fortune murdering people and selling the bodies to the towns people deprived of good cheap meat. I don't know if it is simply the fact that Johnny Depp and Helena Carter, who play the barber and meat pie maker, can hold the most serious and unphased facial expressions, or if it just because the whole concept is just so barbaric and ridiculously pouring out with the fakest red blood ever. It is a musical, which adds to the humor, because there are certain lines which are so depression and sad, that it is funny. The costuming and overall seriousness of the film is hysterical. Murder shouldn't be funny, it isn't, and it is terrifying to hear that this kind of thing may have even happened in some way, but making a musical, which usually embodies happy stories, about murder is so ironic that it makes the topic funny. I don't know if I would laugh quite as much if I would have seen this as the play first, but I think that Depp and Carter do add a lot of the humor to the film, but I think that the musical aspect intertwined with the gory mess of murder creates this weirdly funny movie. Or it could be that my friend Kristie and I are just really weird, and have found our dark side in this movie.