Beetlejuice

Beetlejuice; horror comedy, USA, 1988; D: Tim Burton, S: Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Jeffrey Jones, Catherine O'Hara, Glenn Shadix, Robert Goulet, Sylvia Sidney

Barbara and Adam are a happily married couple in a little town in Connecticut. After they die in a car accident, they are returned to their home as ghosts, not able to get out, while their only clue is the handbook for recently deceased. After the snobbish family Deetz moves into their house, Adam and Barbara decide to scare them out with the help of a bizarre ghost called Beetljuice. Still, the ghost couple makes friends with Lydia, the Deetz daughter. After the Deetz decide to summon the ghosts, all hell breaks loose and Beetlejuice gets freed. Still, Barbara and Adam are able to ban him and make friends with the Deetz.

Cult horror comedy "Beetlejuice" is quite frankly one of the most bizarre and daring Hollywood films from the 80s, a wild mix between Buñuel, Kafka and a Tex Avery cartoon on acid, where the authors didn't care if they drive the viewers crazy so long as they have fun and do whatever they want to with their imagination. In this case, it is a surreal "haunted house" tale where Tim Burton's eccentric direction creates all kind of unbelievable scenes with the help of surreal claymation special effects: Adam as a ghost wants to leave the house, but the moment he does he is transported to a different dimension, a desert planet with two moons equipped with giant sand worms that are reminiscent of Lynch's "Dune". Adam and Barbara want to scare off the Deetz family out of their house, so they model and change their heads to look like a giant chicken and a grotesque jaw.

Michael Keaton as the deranged Beetlejuice is great, especially in the scary sequence where he transforms into a giant snake and appears from the stairway to attack the Deetz family, but Glenn Shadix simply steals the show as the hilarious Otho (especially in the "Day-o" song sequence). That said, the movie is not particularly funny, many things seem senseless or stupid (the confusing ending), its tonal shift is uneven since its horror and comedy elements clash weirdly, whereas not anyone can handle the bizarre tone and make it work, especially when Burton aggressively tries to impose it on the viewers: for all of its incredibly imaginative scenes, the story seems more to be expanding the boundaries of quantity and crackbrained than actual quality and substance. "Beetlejuice" is a sight to behold, but it's not for everyone's taste, whereas it seems it would have been better if it followed the concept of the "Beetlejuice" cartoon where the title hero and the charming Lydia were friends and sidekicks, instead of enemies, since they had more chemistry when Beetlejuice wasn't a complete bad guy.

Grade:++