Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, as a musical and now a film, benefits from a certain amount of notoriety thanks to its apparently contradictory parts: On one hand, it’s a totally fruity musical, on the other, it has a bunch of blood in it. Onstage, that combination is probably more shocking than it is onscreen, where, in a lot of ways, it feels like something a lot more familiar: A pulpy revenge flick, albeit one in which the characters keep bursting into song. It hit DVD on Tuesday; here’s what to expect on the two-disc set if you’re renting it this weekend.

Sweeney Todd’s two-disc special edition has a bunch of special features, all of them solidly produced but largely bland and clip-heavy. There are a lot of 'em, and they’re fine, but overall, they’re pretty standard and underwhelming. (You mean cannibalism is a common theme in folklore? That the legend of Sweeney Todd might be nothing but exaggerated myth? Such is the mind-blowing truth revealed in one featurette, “Sweeney is Alive: The Real History of the Demon Barber.”) “Moviephone Unscripted with Tim Burton and Johnny Depp” and “Sweeney Todd Press Conference” are exactly as engrossing as you’d expect (ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ), while “The Making of Sweeney Todd” has a few interesting snippets buried within, provided you have the patience to wade through its publicist-friendly junket-style interview sessions.

That’s kind of the gist of the whole second disc, actually: It's all very meh, with a few weird, too-brief side-trips that go to more interesting places. The darkly funny “A Bloody Business,” for example, focuses on the gruesome prosthetics used to create Sweeney’s victims’ gushing, crunching deaths, and it ends entirely too quickly--apparently to make room for not one but two featurettes for theater nerds, “Grand Guignol: A Theatrical Tradition” and “Musical Mayhem,” a featurette about the origins of the musical, featuring interviews with composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim. (The most interesting thing here is Sondheim’s awareness that it’s the story that has made Sweeney Todd so successful, not the music. Watching the film a second time, Sondheim’s prickly music didn’t bother me as much as it did the first time, but it’s still incredibly uneven.)

Considering how much music is in Sweeney Todd, it makes sense that there’s no commentary track from Burton, I suppose--though it’s still disappointing, considering Burton’s one of the few directors who can make commentaries interesting. (His defense of his Planet of the Apes was bizarre and fascinating and awkward.) But even more of a let-down is the all-too-simple look at the film’s production design, “Designs for a Demon Barber.” The look of Sweeney Todd is gorgeous and weird, with the art direction earning the film an Oscar--the film's killer production artwork and set-design deserves far more analysis than this cursory examination provides.