Edward is unfinished-the creation of a mad inventor (Vincent Price), now deceased, he has an all-too-human soul but scissors for hands. So he lives alone like Leo the Last in his ancient mansion overlooking a changed neighborhood, all late-sixties pastels and door-to-door housewives. Avon calls, and Edward's life begins: Dianne Wiest's Peg Boggs, the neighborhood naïf, sees a kindred spirit in need of a good astringent, and adopts him. Like his inventor's charming, zany automated assembly-line cookie cutter straight out of Charley Bowers, Edward (the marvelous Johnny Depp) can't do anything practical like eat a pea, but can only create beauty. Topiary leads to nouvelle coiffures for the womenfolk, for whom his snipping touch is positively orgasmic. Tim Burton is Fritz Lang with a happy face, not only in playing off the eroticism of the mechanical but in his observation that the coffee klatch is only a heartbeat away from the lynch mob. Hell hath no fury like a woman shorn.