It’s undoubtedly gilding the lily to claim that “Battleship” is the dumbest movie I’ve ever seen — for all that I front as someone who only likes Turkish films where people stare at the landscape without talking, I’ve seen a lot of dumb movies — but it’s definitely up there. Over and above its extraordinary, mind-melting level of stupidity, “Battleship” (which is directed by actor-turned-filmmaker Peter Berg, of “Hancock” and “Friday Night Lights,” and written by action-flick brothers Erich and Jon Hoeber) is also extremely weird. Its shameless and nonsensical combination of ingredients finally won me over, after a fashion, when I realized that its gung-ho Navy-recruitment propaganda and retrograde gender politics shouldn’t be taken any more seriously than the ZZ Top, AC/DC and Billy Squier songs on the soundtrack. The only point of the whole exercise is to make small boys whoop and holler.

You know that bar over on the roughneck side of town, the one where all the jingoistic, pro-military, America-hell-yeah movies go to quaff some brewskis and swap tales about kickin’ Communist hiney? Yeah, that one. Well, when “Battleship” shows up there and starts breaking beer glasses on its head, “Top Gun” and “Red Dawn” and “The Green Berets” get to feel all grown-up and complicated and full of girly-man sensitivity. That’s how stupid it is. Come to think of it, that’s the same Oahu tavern where we first meet our handsome but headstrong hero, Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch, last seen fleeing the ruins of “John Carter”), who’s enjoying a birthday beverage and stern lecture, both provided by his uptight Navy officer brother, Stone (Alexander Skarsgård). Let me back up and repeat that key piece of information: Skarsgård’s character is named Stone Hopper, and I promise that if you remind me of that in three years, I’ll still think it’s hilarious.

That bar on that evening is also where Alex first claps eyes on Sam (Brooklyn Decker), a leggy, cheerleader-ish blonde who’s come into this testosterone-rich dive bar unaccompanied, only to be denied a microwave burrito. Alex gets her that burrito, and wins her heart, at the end of a painful slapstick sequence that involves the total destruction of a convenience store and him being repeatedly Tased by local law enforcement. Funny! Shortly after that, we get to see Sam wearing short-shorts and a tank top, smooching with Alex on the beach — and that’s the one and only moment of faint implied sexuality anywhere in “Battleship.” Decker’s Sam might as well be encased in a glass vitrine; for the rest of the movie she’s seen only in chaste white dresses or tomboyish outdoor clothes. She’s less a Megan Fox-style sex object than a small boy’s vague and non-threatening idea of a sexy lady, and in her remaining scenes with Alex she spends her time urging him — I’m not kidding about this! — to ask her father for her hand.

Alex doesn’t get around to doing that right away, because after the seemingly endless throat-clearing of these early scenes, stuff finally starts happening and the action movie gets here at last. See, Alex has been dragged into the Navy by his big brother Stone Hopper and somehow gotten an officer’s commission, and Sam’s dad (Liam Neeson, doing his growly Amurkin act) is some big-shot admiral who hates him, and then some huge alien vessels from outer space show up, because of a beacon sent out there by geek scientists (thanks, nerds!), destroy Hong Kong and land in the Pacific right in the middle of RIMPAC, which sounds vaguely pornographic but is actually a massive naval exercise involving fleets from many nations. The alien ships are immense gleaming CGI monstrosities wielding impressive firepower — as usual, far beyond our comprehension, etc. — but they’re also kind of the McMansions of the alien-invader world, meaning that they look great for the first few minutes and then you start wondering what the point is, and how well anybody thought any of this through before they started building.

There appear to be no clear rules governing the behavior of the marauding aliens, which is to say that the only rule is this: Despite their overwhelming military superiority, the invaders must have weaknesses that will eventually allow the United States Navy to boo-ya all over their asses. So the aliens never fire on anyone who doesn’t pose a direct threat (except when they do), even though their apparent purpose is world conquest. They come from a planet that, as we are repeatedly told, is very similar to Earth, yet they have reptilian eyeballs and cannot tolerate direct sunlight. Their ships can apparently fly — or, at least, they flew here across millions of miles of space — yet they navigate through the ocean with a frog-hopping motion not unlike metallic whales doing the butterfly stroke. In fairness, all the big machines and humanoid monsters and things that go boom are awesomely rendered; Berg has definitely spent his reported $200 million budget on stuff you can see. It’s just all so profoundly stupid.

Thanks to whatever marketing logic dictates that these kinds of summer movies have to last more than two hours, Berg and the screenwriters pack in all kinds of Navy protocol, ludicrous subplots and irrelevant comic business, among the explosions. R&B star Rihanna is here, in a nothing role as a tough-as-nails petty officer, and Tadanobu Asano, a major Japanese star whose presence may pay off in East Asia, plays a kind of guest-star captain who figures out how to track the radar-cloaked alien ships using a low-tech grid that somewhat resembles — yes! — the traditional layout of the Battleship game. I bet there were high-fives all around in the writing room when they figured that one out. (Let me observe here that playing the Hasbro version is lame; Battleship can and should be played with graph paper.)

I’m not even getting into the bizarre “Space Cowboys” twist toward the end, in which a mothballed World War II-era battleship, and its crew of geriatric docents, is dragged into the fray in a last-ditch effort to save the world. I mean, I know what the title of the movie is, but it’s somehow especially funny that they got all worried about the fact that the real-life Navy doesn’t use battleships anymore. (“Man, we can’t let down the people like this! They want a freakin’ battleship, and they’re gonna get one!”) Plus, did you know that museum ships built 70 years ago are kept all fueled up and ready to go, with stacks of live missile shells piled up behind the Grab-a-Smurf machine? Me neither! But please forgive me; I’m just bitter. Unlike Taylor Kitsch’s endlessly enthusiastic character, I never did get around to asking my wife’s dad for her hand in marriage. And when you get right down to it, isn’t that kind of a charming custom? Why in the world did we let that one get away?

It’s an ancient truism of comedy that what makes us most uncomfortable and shocks us the most is also where the deepest veins of humor reside, and throughout his career Baron Cohen has specialized in prodding those sore spots, sometimes with an evident political point of view, and sometimes totally not. In a throwaway moment early in Baron Cohen’s new movie, “The Dictator” (directed by Baron Cohen’s frequent collaborator Larry Charles, who was also at the helm for “Borat” and “Brüno”), we see the bearded North African tyrant Admiral General Aladeen, portrayed of course by Baron Cohen, playing a first-person-shooter video game called “Munich Olympics.” You’re groaning already, right? Here’s how it works: You knock on the door marked “Israeli Olympic Team.” When a cute little Smurf-like creature in a yarmulke and side-curls answers the door — “Shalom!” — a pop-up widget announces “Shoot the Jew!” and you waste him. It continues from there: “Oy vey!” “Mazeltov!” “Meshugenah!” cry the cheerfully dying figures.

This is funny precisely because it’s not funny, and if that sounds too mystical or dialectical for you, let’s remember that we’re talking about a guy who has cited World War II-era historian Ian Kershaw, who was one of his professors at Cambridge, as a major influence. “I know it’s not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust,” Baron Cohen once told Rolling Stone interviewer Neil Strauss, while making it clear that in exposing the casual cruelty and docile conformity of the ordinary people with whom he interacted he was doing exactly that. You can argue there’s a personal agenda at work here, since Baron Cohen grew up in a prominent British Jewish family and is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor (in his words, the last Jewish girl trained as a ballerina in Nazi Germany). But I see something more than that, a dark and even misanthropic moral and intellectual vision that conceals, somewhere way deep down, the smothered hope for a better world.

We laugh at the “Munich Olympics” video game (if, indeed, we do laugh) because we’re appalled and we see some truth in it. We’re appalled that Baron Cohen and his co-writers were malicious enough to come up with it, we’re appalled with ourselves for so readily accepting it as humor, and we’re appalled by the incontrovertible fact that some people — in places like Aladeen’s fictional homeland, the Republic of Wadiya, but also in Britain and the U.S. and anywhere else you care to mention — would take smirking delight in such a game if it existed. (Which, for all I know, it may.)

“The Dictator” is a much more normal kind of movie than “Borat” or “Brüno,” perhaps because Baron Cohen is now too famous — and has been threatened too many times with lawsuits and/or beatdowns — to pull off his in-character performance provocations. (Frankly, hadn’t the shtick worn out by the time of the very mixed “Brüno” anyway?) Despite some cleverly snipped bits of real news footage from the Libyan crisis, “The Dictator” is a scripted entertainment from start to finish, with Baron Cohen playing both the vainglorious and idiotic Wadiyan autocrat and also the even dumber rural goatherd selected to serve as his assassination-thwarting double. On a trip to New York to address the United Nations, the real Aladeen gets separated from his entourage, thanks to an incompetent CIA blowhard played by John C. Reilly. Shorn of his beard and of his access to voluptuous hookers and anti-Semitic video games, the erstwhile dictator is forced to work in a feminist food collective in Brooklyn, where he falls hard for Anna Faris, as its unshaven-armpit, pixie-cut sporting, ultra-p.c. manager. (Aladeen repeatedly remarks that she has the physique of a preteen boy — and specifically of Harry Potter — but it’s not clear whether that’s a bad thing.)

Although the character of Aladeen seems awfully predictable by Baron Cohen standards, the movie itself veers from one hilarious, absurd and patently offensive setup to the next, mercilessly mocking the stupidity and paranoia of Americans, the venality of celebrities — there’s a joke about Katy Perry’s purported relations with Aladeen that I can’t even euphemize successfully — the Chinese lust for world domination and the cultural vapidity and backwardness of the Arab world. There are moments of unabated vulgar silliness, as when a rich woman gazing out the window of a Manhattan luxury hotel gets an unexpected faceful of wobbly Aladeen dong. And there are even moments when Baron Cohen’s portrayal of the benighted dictator — who is perhaps more ignorant and miseducated than innately evil — borders on sweetness, if you can really use that word to describe a film that involves jokes about rape, torture, abortion and fellatio performed with a geriatric drug dealer’s severed head.

But let’s revert to my original WTF question about Baron Cohen by way of this film’s obvious relationship to Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 “The Great Dictator,” which is also about a demented world leader with genocidal fantasies and the ordinary citizen (in Chaplin’s film, a Jewish barber) who becomes his accidental replacement. On one level, of course, the comparison is ridiculous. Chaplin’s film is a masterpiece, or something close to it — prescient, daring and almost unbearably tragic, an optimistic and sentimental plea for reason in a world teetering on the edge of the abyss. Remember that when that film was released, the U.S. and Germany were not yet at war and the worst atrocities of the Holocaust had not yet happened, although the film seems to see them coming.

I can’t resist feeling that “The Dictator” (whose screenplay is credited to Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer, along with Baron Cohen) restages Chaplin’s great farce in a darker and more vulgar register, to reflect a world that has been fundamentally poisoned, not just by Hitler’s crimes but by decades of subsequent mendacity and hypocrisy. I shouldn’t spoil Aladeen’s climactic speech, in which he praises the many virtues of dictatorship (which the Western world has so foolishly left behind), except to say that it’s a brilliant, sardonic response to the paean to progress and democracy delivered by Chaplin’s barber in the guise of the dictator Hynkel — and that its targets are you and me, not the known tyrants and despots of the Arab world. “We are coming into a new world, a kindlier world, where men will rise above their hate, their greed and brutality,” Chaplin’s character tells the world. There are good reasons to suspect that Baron Cohen, who spent his teen years active in the Zionist-socialist youth organization Habonim Dror (which advocates peace between Israel and its neighbors), is a lefty somewhere deep down. But the new world without hate, greed and brutality — nuh-uh, he’s heard that one before.

Furthermore, the relationship between violent and horrifying entertainment and actual violence is ambiguous, to say the least. The United States is a uniquely violent society within the developed world, but over the last 30 or 40 years (the heyday of horror, roughly speaking) crime rates have dropped sharply overall. Meanwhile, over the last 15 or 20 years we’ve seen a plethora of twisted and disturbing films emerging from Western Europe, Japan and South Korea — arguably the least violent societies in world history — as well as from places like Russia, the Balkans and Southeast Asia, where the sociological picture is, shall we say, a bit more chaotic. Where many psychologists see a pernicious dehumanizing or desensitizing effect in violent entertainment, libertarian media scholar Jib Fowles has suggested it may actually be beneficial, serving as a cathartic escape valve and helping to reduce real-world violence. Personally, I suspect they’re asking somewhat different questions and may both be right — but that’s a discussion for another time.

This week’s stop on the global mayhem tour is the Philippines, a tropical island nation with a significant violent crime problem, to go along with chronic government corruption and sporadic outbreaks of terrorism. None of which has all that much to do with “The Road,” a low-budget shocker from Filipino filmmaker Yam Laranas (who serves as writer, director, cinematographer, co-editor and co-producer) that crams several different genres into 110 minutes, in classic Asian exploitation-movie style, and could just as easily have been made in Indonesia or Belgium or Texas. Perhaps especially Texas; this is an “Oh no, we took a wrong turn” movie, in which the teenagers with no driver’s license turn off the main highway onto that closed-off dirt road that nobody ever takes, the one Google Maps identifies as “Inbred Weirdo Cannibal Lane.”

“The Road” is being promoted in the U.S. by boxing champ Manny Pacquiao — a Filipino national hero — as a signal cultural achievement, probably the first Filipino-made film to reach general release here. Such is the world we live in, I guess. Filipino indie auteur Brillante Mendoza, a genuine cinema pioneer who won the Best Director award at Cannes in 2009, has had a couple of his movies shown in American cities, but I’d be willing to bet Manny Pacquiao has never heard of him and isn’t interested. None of that is Laranas’ fault, of course; he’s made the movie that he’s made, and if it’s patchy and derivative it also has a compelling, soapy undertow that kept me watching.

If you want to be mean, you could observe that “The Road” is spatially incoherent — different locations clearly have nothing to do with each other, and Laranas uses the same 50-yard stretch of road over and over again — or that it has several different overlapping nonsensical premises. Who blocked off the road, and why? Is it: A) just the road to some psycho’s house; B) a road haunted by driverless cars and slow-moving ghosts with plastic bags over their heads; C) a space-time anomaly and/or a dimensional portal; or D) all of the above? Still, Laranas does cultivate a mood of distinctive menace and mystery, not to mention a convoluted and ambitious chronology. We begin in the present, when a handsome young cop (Filipino TV heartthrob TJ Trinidad) takes on the case of the missing teens, and then skip backward and forward in time — first to a grueling kidnapping case in 1998, and then back to its prehistory in 1988 — in search of the underlying mystery. And if the so-called explanation for what’s going on is standard-issue serial-killer psychology, it also contains an ingenious twist I didn’t see coming.

I’m actually grateful to Laranas for not including the usual expository scene, in which the old-time sheriff pushes his hat back on his head, whistles through his teeth and says, “You talkin’ about the old Aquino place, out there on Dead Teenager Path? Son, some things is best left alone.” (Then, of course, some crazy-acting newspaper reporter or Internet geek slips our hero the real dope.) Instead, “The Road” moves from a deeply silly opening sequence — why is that driverless ghost car so slow? A joke that completes itself! — through a grueling and even stomach-turning middle portion toward an oddly sentimental conclusion, complete with flowers, butterflies and evildoers forgiven in heaven. Come to think of it, Laranas may indeed be thinking about his homeland’s social problems, and there may be something distinctively Filipino about this movie’s blend of fatalism, despair and religiosity. Either that, or human beings are just into sin and redemption, and yearn for order amid chaos. That could be it, too.

“The Road” is now playing in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Honolulu, Houston, Jacksonville, Fla., Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Ore., San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C., with other cities likely to follow. It’s also available on-demand from many cable and satellite providers.

As those who have seen Kore-eda’s wrenching 2004 near-masterpiece “Nobody Knows” are already aware, he has a remarkable ability to work with children, and also to capture the geographical and psychological landscape of childhood, where objectively minor events can have enormous significance. (Other titles from Kore-eda’s exceptionally varied oeuvre to check out: “Still Walking,” “After Life” and his 1995 feature debut, “Maborosi.”) In “I Wish” he captures the different worlds of two separated brothers, who both yearn (at least officially) to get their parents back together and reunite as a family. Koichi (Koki Maeda), aged around 12, is an introspective kid with a permanently stunned expression who’s on the edge of teenage alienation. He lives with his mom and grandparents on the southern tip of the island of Kyushu, in the shadow of the ash-spewing volcano Sakurajima. (A major eruption, he imagines, might be just the catastrophe required to undo the divorce.) His younger brother, Ryu (played by Koki’s real-life brother, Ohshiro Maeda), is an ultra-cute, gregarious kid who hangs with a posse of platonic girlfriends and lives with his kind but irresponsible indie-rock dad in the city of Fukuoka, about 175 miles to the north.

Kore-eda is often celebrated in international film circles as a throwback to the Japanese Golden Age of big-name directors like Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa — he has said his favorite is the lesser-known Mikio Naruse, director of “Late Chrysanthemums” and “Floating Clouds” — but there’s nothing forbidding or ascetic about the precise, bittersweet childhood world of “I Wish.” Indeed, according to Kore-eda, the initial inspiration came from the new bullet-train line (or “shinkansen,” in Japanese) that opened last year on Kyushu — and the first image that came into his head was that of the kids walking along the railroad track in “Stand by Me.” Indeed, “I Wish” possesses the tender intimacy, mixed with the slightest tinge of grown-up irony, of some of the very best tales of childhood adventure, from Stephen King to E. Nesbit to Truffaut’s “Small Change.”

Koichi and Ryu, you see, have heard about a piece of shinkansen folklore: When a new train line opens, if you can observe the precise moment when two trains pass each other at high speed for the very first time, wishes can come true and miracles become possible. They’d like to believe this, and maybe partly do, but Kore-eda clearly sees that the imagination of children (and adults too) is not constrained by questions of logic or plausibility. The two boys’ convoluted (and surprisingly expensive) scheme to run away overnight, along with several friends and all their wishes, becomes its own kind of miracle, and the magic it yields — including a fairy godmother! — is even more precious because it requires no suspension of disbelief.

Arguably, the quest for a bullet-train miracle is something of a MacGuffin in “I Wish.” It’s a good one, because it pays off in the end, but the real point of the movie is watching the way Kore-eda and the Maeda brothers (who also work as a kid-comedy act in Japan) capture the competing worlds of Ryu and Koichi with heartbreaking specificity. Koichi, the older of the two, is in many ways less worldly; he can’t quite see that his desire to reunite the family is about as likely to happen as one friend’s desire to become the next Ichiro Suzuki, or another’s to grow up and marry the leggy middle-school librarian. (Like a true romantic, he doesn’t notice or care that she’ll be pushing 50 by the time he’s legal.) As we regard Koichi through Kore-eda’s sympathetic but slightly detached camera — the cinematographer is Yutaka Yamazaki — we both cling to his last moments of innocence and root for him to grow up and reach a more mature understanding of the world. On that knife edge of yearning and longing is this whole film balanced.

Koichi’s only sustaining adult relationship is with his garrulous, chain-smoking grandpa (Isao Hashizume), who was once famous for his traditional sponge cake but now can’t get the recipe right. His mother Nozomi (wonderfully played by Nene Ohtsuka) is lost in booze and self-pity after her breakup with indulgent wastrel Kenji (Joe Odagiri), who’s raising Ryu in a household of benign rock ‘n’ roll neglect. Perhaps the most devastating scene in the entire movie is a wordless interlude when we watch Nozomi coming home from an evening out drinking with friends. Momentarily giddy, she buys an electronic flashing duck from a street vendor, but by the time she reaches her bus stop she doesn’t think it’s so funny anymore and gazes at it in puzzlement and anguish: Why did I buy this, and how did I get here?

Children, of course, will forgive the grown-ups in their lives almost any degree of lameness and irresponsibility if they feel loved, and Kore-eda takes somewhat the same attitude with his adult characters. Even in a slightly darker subplot involving Ryu’s aspiring actress friend Megumi (Kyara Uchida) and her embittered bartending mother (Yui Natsukawa), what we see is a parent doing the best she can, who has lost the ability to see the bigger picture. (If you have kids too, you’ve been there and done that.) When the kids make their pilgrimage to the mystical bullet-train spot, it may not bring Ryu and Koichi back together permanently, or launch a baseball superstar’s career, or bring a beloved family dog back to life. But those aren’t the only forms of magic, and this marvelous work of all-ages movie craftsmanship has magic aplenty.

“I Wish” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles. It opens May 25 in Boston, Philadelphia and Washington; June 1 in Chicago, Honolulu, Palm Springs, Calif., San Diego, San Francisco and San Jose, Calif.; June 8 in Atlanta, Denver and Phoenix; June 14 in Bloomington, Ind.; June 15 in Minneapolis and New Orleans; and June 22 in St. Louis and Seattle, with other cities and home video to follow.

There’s no doubt that Burton’s “Dark Shadows” has issues, and it will probably be considered a misfire in many quarters. It’s so incredibly specific — in its detailed recall of the original late-’60s “Dark Shadows” soap opera (truly one of the strangest series in television history), its finely honed hambone acting by Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer and Helena Bonham Carter, and its campy but affectionate treatment of its Nixon-era setting — that it’s hard to tell who the intended audience is. Me, evidently, along with other relics of that era and longtime “Dark Shadows” fans who’ve been waiting — and waiting, and waiting — for Barnabas Collins to be exhumed yet again, along with his lugubrious extended family. (We’ll talk about the doomed 1991 series some other time, OK?) But I honestly don’t know what sense it will make to people who show up because Johnny Depp and Tim Burton made a vampire comedy and that sounds cool. This “Dark Shadows” clearly leaves the sepulcher door ajar — nay, gaping wide open — for potential sequels. But it’s such an odd movie and it’s facing the triumphalist superhero tidal wave of “Avengers.” Disaster is definitely possible, so I’m not holding my breath.

Anyway, here’s the principal issue I see with Burton and screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith’s (he of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”) strange blend of nostalgia, farce and spooky-loo: Total delicious goodness! Oh, sure, it all comes unglued in the final 15 minutes, when like all Hollywood movies the story devolves into CGI fight scenes and stuff blowing up. But “Dark Shadows” offers potent atmosphere and delirious ’70s fashions and hilarious gags and some really terrific performances, none better than Pfeiffer’s triumphant return to the screen as a pitch-perfect family matriarch. This film seems to engage Burton’s attention and imagination as no movie has since — well, a very long time ago. You can definitely make a case for his 2007 version of “Sweeney Todd,” and the animated “Corpse Bride” is more enjoyable than most of Burton’s live-action films, but so much of his career — like that of Depp, his good friend and muse — has been expended on stylish resuscitations of moribund pop-culture properties that look great but just go through the motions, storytelling-wise.

That Schwinn bike outside Collinwood is a good way of explaining the delicate balance Burton and Grahame-Smith try to strike here. This “Dark Shadows” seeks to be just as melodramatic and claustrophobic and ridiculous as Dan Curtis’ original series — which only introduced its supernatural elements out of desperation, in an effort to raise abysmal ratings — but not exactly in the same way. Yes, the self-aware camp factor has been turned way up, and that will no doubt displease some original fans. When Depp’s Barnabas, an 18th-century gentleman vampire, is first loosed from his 200-year imprisonment by a road construction crew, he marvels at the towering luminescence above him, clearly the work of Mephistopheles (the golden arches of a McDonald’s). Later, upon glimpsing Karen Carpenter on TV, he is disturbed and beguiled: “What sorcery is this? Reveal yourself, tiny songstress!” Curtis’ show certainly never contained internal gags of that sort, but from the audience point of view, it was a camp object even at the time; its goodness and badness and creepiness and sex appeal were always intertwined and inextricable.

If you’re too young to have seen the original “Dark Shadows” — which remained a daytime staple, in reruns, well into the 1980s, and is now available on DVD in (almost) its 1,245-episode entirety — or just aren’t wired that way, explaining its importance may not be possible. The main thing to point out is the immensely different cultural context in which the show emerged. Barnabas Collins predates not just “Twilight” and “True Blood,” but also Anne Rice’s “Interview With the Vampire” and the entire rise of the Goth sensibility. In the 1970s, vampires were something that only marginal weirdos who went to science-fiction bookstores and watched Hammer films like “Dracula: Prince of Darkness” knew about. People like the teenage Tim Burton, in other words. (Christopher Lee, who played Dracula in seven Hammer movies, has a cameo role here, at least his fifth performance for Burton.)

Many of us unlucky enough to be conscious during the 1970s were desperate for markers of cultural difference, and “Dark Shadows” offered a big one in the years before punk rock. If you were into that show, you probably listened to records by Alice Cooper and the Rolling Stones and the Velvet Underground. You read Tolkien, and Harlan Ellison. You also watched “Star Trek,” an extremely different kind of show with some odd similarities. (Each became more popular after their cancellation; each starred a Canadian Shakespeare actor — William Shatner and Jonathan Frid, respectively — who took a low-paying TV gig that would define the rest of his life.) You probably knew the guy in your town who sold Acapulco Gold and Panama Red.

But I wouldn’t make an argument for “Dark Shadows” purely on context and significance, and Depp and Burton don’t either. Curtis’ show made a virtue out of poverty, and while that might not have been entirely new in pop culture, it sure felt that way. Wobbly sets, flubbed lines and wandering stagehands became part of its live-to-video appeal (nothing was ever shot twice), but the zero-tech effects, stilted dialogue and noodly score (by Robert Cobert) were often surprisingly powerful. After Barnabas was loosed from his coffin about a year into the series, the storytelling became increasingly unhinged and improvisational — there were werewolves, zombies, witches and time travel — and the show’s long arc featured two long detours into two different past centuries, along with parallel and contingent universes that might befuddle Stephen Hawking. It was all made up on the fly, of course, and didn’t necessarily make sense, but there’s no question it fired the imagination of a generation: Burton and Quentin Tarantino and Joss Whedon and J.J. Abrams and countless others.

Burton and Grahame-Smith essentially build a series of affectionate riffs on the characters and situations of the original series, and personally I can only wish there were a lot more of it. The aforementioned Vicky Winters bears an uncanny resemblance to Barnabas’ long-ago lost love, Josette, who was driven to suicide by Angelique (spectral French actress Eva Green, still awaiting her moment of Hollywood stardom), the comely witch he spurned who then sought gruesome revenge. Indeed, when Barnabas returns to 1972 Collinwood and divulges his secret to the resolute Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Pfeiffer) and then to drunken, zaftig New York psychiatrist Julia Hoffman (Bonham Carter, hilariously mimicking the mannered performance of the late Grayson Hall in the original), he soon discovers that Angelique has endured into the 20th century as well — and, like all women, still wants him.

Is it inherently bizarre and pointless that Burton has spent millions of dollars on a studied, postmodern attempt to both emulate and parody something that was made on the cheap, and that essentially parodied itself at the moment of its creation? I dunno. If you rely on Susan Sontag’s famous definitions of camp, the original “Dark Shadows” would count as naive or “Pure Camp,” whereas Burton’s film can only be “Camp which knows itself to be Camp,” which Sontag says is less satisfying. I’m not sure these distinctions hold up, personally, and I see no moment of innocence in pop culture’s past. Burton and Depp have made this film out of a pure, deep passion for something that was created 40 years ago for entirely pragmatic reasons — a desire to keep a TV show on the air and get paid for it — and then fed on its own nuttiness and the public’s almost erotic appetite for something new. In so doing, they may have created a movie that’s meant for a mass audience, but that only a few people will enjoy the way they do. (The “Cable Guy” of vampire movies, perhaps.) A mistake, and a failure? Maybe. But isn’t that a wonderful twist to the tale?