Following his success with "Pee Wee's Big Adventure," Tim Burton decided to flex his creative muscles and show the world what was really going on inside of that head of his. The result is this slapdash, confusing, sometimes funny but always fun ghost pic starring one insufferably annoying Michael Keaton.
Following and unfortunate accident on a bridge, recently deceased Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) find themselves dealing with new issues not commonly known about the afterlife. First, they can't leave their house due to the fact that they will be transported to Saturn where sandmonsters will try and eat them. Second, their mysteriously appearing handbook on being dead reads "like stereo instructions". Third and most important, a family of artsy New Yorker's have moved in and plan to renovate the house to make it a bit more trendy. Barbara and Adam, being newly dead, are not too skilled at haunting yet and can't seem to figure out how to get them out.
Jeffery Jones is Charles Deetz who brings his family out into the country following a nervous breakdown in New York. Catherine O'Hara is his wife, Delia, a would-be sculptor and artiste who is about as phony as a three dollar bill. And Winona Ryder in one of her first screen performances is Lydia, a young girl with a fondness for black lace, spiders, and Polaroid photos. Also in tow is Otho, a paranormal interior decorator who knows as much about the occult as he does about designer shoes. I don't get him--maybe you could explain him to me.
The Maitland's handbook says the living ignore the strange and unusual, but the unusualness of Lydia means she can see them and they form something of a surrogate family. When the rest of the family is finally convinced of the presence of ghosts (in a hilarious and iconic dinner-party scene involving the calypso and shrimp cocktails), instead of running away frightened they decide to invest in the situation and turn the house into a tourist attraction.
Out of ideas of how to scare these pests away, the Maitland's turn to the one source they've been warned to avoid at all costs: a bio-exorcist named Beetlejuice. Keaton plays the loud, boorish, slapsticky and completely vile character, whose 17 minutes on screen feel like an eternity. Trapped forever in a model of the town, he uses he particular skills of revulsion to get the living away from the dead.
This is a zippy, trippy and nonsensical film, but I've always liked it. The jumps through time are confusing and there are so many unanswered and conflicting questions about the rules of the afterlife. I don't need it to make sense per se as this is a story about ghosts, I just need these rules to be clear so I don't get distracted from the film puzzling over them. However, always a bit like Lydia and Burton myself, I find the dark humor and gothic atmosphere really exciting and interesting to look at. The makeup, sets and costumes are all brilliant which add together to create one little house of Burton.
Several of the performances are very good too. O'Hara is scene-stealing as the conniving, trendy, two-faced stepmother, and Davis is always hilarious in what she does. Ryder shows off some definite potential in this role as well. I suppose Glenn Shadix as Otho was funny, but his character made absolutely no sense at all which I found irritating.
All in all this is a showcase for Burton's eccentric mind and the work of some stellar makeup artists. I'm sure had I been alive and actively watching films when this came out I would be very interested in seeing what future work Burton would bring to the table. No other director has such a distinct style to his work and it is clear that it all began here.
3/4
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