Anyone Care For A Meat Pie?

This movie, Gentle Reader, I am so looking forward to seeing. Directed by the master, Tim Burton, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is based on the Stephen Sondheim musical that first appeared on Broadway from 1979 to 1980. However, the origins of the character go back farther than that. Sweeney Todd and his murderous tale first appeared in the Victorian era, in an 1846 edition of the penny dreadful, The People's Periodical. There are some scholars and historians that claim the stories of Sweeney Todd were based on fact, although there has been little in the way of evidence to support these claims.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street tells the story of Benjamin Barker, a good man with a wife and daughter who is falsely convicted of a crime and sent to a penal colony in Australia. Barker returns to London 15 years later as Sweeney Todd bent on revenge. Todd opens a barber shop above the shop of Mrs. Lovett who sells, "the worst meat pies in London." Todd rather gruesomely begins dispatching all of those whom he believes did him wrong, with Mrs. Lovett getting rid of the bodies. You can imagine how she manages that, owning a meat pie shop and all. Todd's madness has method to it as he hopes to be reunited with his daughter who is now the ward of the judge that wrongly sent him to Australia.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street opens on 21 December, 2007 (a perfect Christmas movie) and stars Johnny Depp as Sweeney Todd, Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett and Alan Rickman as Judge Turpin. Be warned, Gentle Reader, that this is a musical and as such, is about 90% singing with very little spoken dialogue and it's very bloody, but in the hands of Tim Burton, what would one expect?