Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2008)

Fifteen years after being transported to the Colonies on trumped-up charges, Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp) slinks back to London with a new name, Sweeney Todd, and bloody revenge in his heart. Setting up business in his old room above Mrs Lovett's (Helena Bonham Carter) rancid pie shop, he plots the downfall of Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), the villain who drove his wife to suicide and took his daughter as his own. Todd's vengeance is slightly sidetracked by Mrs Lovett's economical plan to make his close-shave victims a delicious ingredient in her cannibal concoctions, but the Demon Barber's determination to bleed Turpin dry propels the film to its blood-soaked conclusion.

Director Tim Burton adapts Stephen Sondheim's already gory musical into an even bloodier film. From the opening credits to the closing reel, the red stuff oozes through seemingly every scene. And, while the violence is explicit, as bones crunch and blood sprays, its contrast to the dingy background colours gives the film a cartoonish quality that makes it suitably horrid, but never horrifying. Depp and Bonham Carter are perfectly matched as the monochrome misfits, and Rickman proves once again that, from the Sheriff of Nottingham to Severus Snape, nobody sneers quite as well as he does