It’s fair to say that Sweeney Todd (R for graphic bloody violence) is the bloodiest musical ever to splatter the silver screen. This film is not in the same genre as West Side Story or Hairspray. It’s a horror film that happens to be backed up with a brilliant musical score.

The story concerns a barber named Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp, who can actually sing), who is robbed of his beautiful wife and baby by a jealous, deviant judge (Alan Rickman), falsely convicted, and sent to prison. After fifteen festering years, Barker – now calling himself Sweeney Todd - returns to London, ravenous for revenge, and returns to his barbershop in his old garret above a meat pie shop run by Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter). “We all deserve to die, Mrs. Lovett,” he grimly sings, and he and his razor will gruesomely help the matter along, and with gusto. Business starts going like gangbusters, both for him and for Mrs. Lovett, who finds that the exorbitant price of meat for her pies is now irrelevant, and not because profits are up.

This film retains much of the legendary Sondheim score, but fans of the musical might be disappointed at the disappearance of several songs, including “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd”. There’s a purpose to the exclusion; director Tim Burton has made a movie based on a musical, rather than simply adapting a musical for film, resulting in a stronger narrative flow and little to distract from the central premise. As a result, it’s darker, less funny, and angrier than the original. Burton’s visual style has reached maturity – monochromatic, gothic, and a little crazy, and in his finest work to date, he has pushed this legend into its darkest corners. Depp’s palpable rage, in his singing and especially his eyes, is downright terrifying.

“Freely flows the blood of those who moralize,” sings the chorus in the stage version. Point well taken. If there’s a moral to Sweeney Todd, it’s that revenge poisons the mind beyond reason and destroys indiscriminately. No man is uncorrupted.