“I’m the ghost with the most, babe.”

Justin’s rating: Daylight come and me wanna go home

Justin’s review: When you think about it, it was really weird to be a kid in the late ’80s or early ’90s and be denied these PG-13 and R-rated spectacles — but have total access to the cartoon versions. So I know I wasn’t alone in being initially exposed to RoboCop, Rambo, Police Academy, and even (for whatever reason) The Toxic Avenger on the small screen.

One of the animated series that was a particular favorite of mine was the 1989-1991 Beetlejuice. Man, I loved me some Beetlejuice cartoon. It was colorful, trippy, and had one of the best opening sequences of all time. I watched it religiously when I could get it.

So imagine how utterly traumatizing it was to eventually jump into the original Tim Burton movie. Wait, Beetlejuice is the bad guy? He and Lydia aren’t BFFs? They don’t hang out in the Neitherworld together? WHAT IS HAPPENING.

I mean, I eventually got over my inner conflict, but it was a really weird way to come to this classic flick.

Beetlejuice was Tim Burton’s second major motion picture, and this is where he really unleashed his inner quirky horror in a big way. Years before Nightmare Before Christmas provided goths with an enduring role model, this was kind of doing the same thing. And I have to imagine that nobody was prepared for it.

When married couple Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis) crash and drown, they’re dismayed to discover that they’ve come back as ghosts in their house. They’re even more dismayed when an extremely Yuppie clan moves into the place and starts extensive renovations. What do ghosts fear? Apparently, having their abodes haunted by the persnickety living.

The couple wrestle with the rules and — it turns out — monumental bureaucracy of the afterlife, trying to learn how to spook the Deetz clan out of house and home. None of it seems to work, although they do start making friends with the Deetz’s lonely daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder), who herself is “strange and unusual” and can see the ghosts.

Desperate for a solution, Adam and Barbara end up summoning Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), a malcontent trickster ghost who’s kind of a jerk and really just wants to marry Lydia to stay in the living world. Things rapidly escalate on both the human and spectral front, and it’s up to the trio to figure out a way to put the lid back on the Beetlejuice box and make peace in this haunted home.

The story on its own is shaky lunacy — a well-told story is never one of Tim Burtin’s strengths — but it’s heightened by an excellent cast of oddball characters and tremendous set design. Even the house is a strange landmark in its own right, too tall and too white to be real — and that’s before the Deetz clan reshapes it.

I think it was genius for Burton to seize upon the afterlife as a premise, as so few movies before (or, truly, since) have had creative fun with this concept. It really makes for an “anything goes” scenario where part of the fun is having the rules spelled out for us — literally in the case of the Handbook for the Recently Deceased.

As much as I was grooving on the dark humor, easily the best part of this movie is Adam and Barbara’s exploration of the bureaucratic netherworld. It’s like someone fashioned the most amazing haunted house and then took the viewer on a personal tour.

Ghosts vs. Yuppies vs. Super Evil Ghost makes for one of the most unique movies of the ’80s — and that’s really saying something. I might’ve had a hard time with my initial experience, but this mixture of laughs, screams, and Winona Ryder truly grew on me. Like grave fungus.

Deneb’s rating: Three out of four delicious, crunchy beetles.

Deneb’s review: It’s a little hard to imagine what modern cult-movie fandom would be like without Tim Burton. Heck, in some ways, it’s difficult to imagine what modern pop culture in general would be like without Tim Burton. He’s one of the forefathers of the modern superhero movie, he more or less gave birth to the Goth subculture (or, at least, was very instrumental in shaping its current form), he launched Johnny Depp’s career in film, and he gave us Michelle Pfeiffer in a skin-tight black kitty-cat outfit (the, er, ramifications of which I will not discuss here). He’s not the most prolific of directors, and he’s made a few less-than-marvelous pictures over the years, but one has to respect the amount of times he’s gotten it juuuust right. He is still the King of Weird.

Ah, but this was not always the case. Back in the late ‘80’s, he was just the guy who’d directed a quirky film starring Pee-Wee Herman. It was pretty nifty and all, but everyone pretty much credited Pee-Wee himself for that – nobody really thought that this Burton fella would go anywhere.

One film changed all that. One film sent him rocketing up from the depths of obscurity and into the rarified status of Grand Poo-Bah of Spirals that he’s inhabited ever since. That film? Beetlejuice, the one I’m reviewing right here and now. So I guess I might as well stop prevaricating all over the place, and get down to it.

Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) are a nice young couple who eke out a comfortable existence out in the wilds of Connecticut. They’ve got a nice house, a reliable source of income, and they’re madly in love with each other. (One thing they don’t have is kids, but, y’know, they’re working on that.)

Yessir, they’re livin’ the American dream – right until they get killed in a car accident and find themselves trapped in their dream house as the resident ghosts. That kind of puts a damper on things.

(This is one aspect of the film, by the way, that has never really made sense to me. Why are they trapped in the house if they didn’t die in the house? Surely that goes against all established haunting rules? Home is where the heart is, I guess, but still it’s weird.)

Still, things aren’t too bad – they’ve got each other, they’ve got a nice place to… er, exist in, and hey, they’re dead. What more could they have to worry about?

Enter the Deetzes, a clan of yuppie New Yorkers. Charles Deetz (Jeffrey Jones) has a case of frazzled nerves, and yearns for peace and quiet – which is why he’s just bought the Maitlands’ house. His wife, Delia (Catherine O’Hara) can’t stand the place, but she’ll live in it as long as she can knock down a few walls and redecorate.

Needless to say, Adam and Barbara don’t care for this state of affairs at all, but what can they do? They’re rookies at this ghost stuff – all they’ve got is a copy of the “Handbook for the Recently Deceased”, and a strained relationship with Juno (Sylvia Sidney), their cranky afterlife caseworker. They do have a budding friendship with Lydia (Winona Ryder), the Deetzes’ moody proto-Goth teenager – but she’s the only one who can see them, and as a kid, nobody listens to her, so she’s unlikely to be useful in stopping their lovely home from being vandalized by Delia’s tide of ghastly modern art.

All in all, an unpleasant situation. What’s to be done?

Well, there is that Beetlejuice fella they keep hearing about (the film spells it “Betelgeuse”, as in the star, but dagnab it, which version is the title of the film?). He claims to be a “bio-exorcist” who will rid houses of the living – and he doesn’t even charge anything! All they’ve got to do is say his name three times…

Inevitably, they do, and just as inevitably, they get more than they bargained for.

OK, there is one thing that must be discussed about Beetlejuice first and foremost, and that’s, well, Beetlejuice. Not having watched this movie for a while, there are two things (I guess, in the context of BJ himself being a thing – well, no, he’s a person, not a thing, but for the sake of this definition, let’s call him a thing – that would make them… sub-things? Sub-topics? I dunno) that I always seem to forget.

One is how little he’s actually in the movie – despite the fact that he’s the title character, he’s only got something like fifteen minutes of screen time. The second is how gross he is. I mean, it’s not like he’s stop-the-movie-I’m-gonna-hurl disgusting or anything, but the guy has mold growing on his skin. This is appropriate enough for someone who’s theoretically some variety of undead, but really, he looks less like he’s been moldering in the grave and more like he hasn’t had a real bath for about a century or so. These things are not emphasized on the movie posters, ya know?

All that aside, BJ kicks ass. While he’s definitely the film’s antagonist, he’s not so much evil as completely out of control – he does what he wants to do when he wants to do it, and damn the torpedoes. Despite his assurances to the Maitlands that he wants to be “real pals” with them, he’s clearly only in it for his own ends – and those are primarily for him to hit on every woman he meets, devour every insect he meets, and satisfy his bizarre sense of humor. For all that, he’s reasonably sympathetic, in a twisted sort of way – one gets the feeling he’d be fun to hang around with if you got on his wavelength, but that might take a long, long time. Like Juno says, “he does not work well with others.”

As for said others? Well, the Maitlands are pretty convincing as the nice young couple who’d invite you over for dinner if they weren’t, y’know, dead. They’re newbies at this ghost stuff, and it shows – they don’t want to hurt anyone, they just want those nasty city folks to leave their precious house alone. The city folks themselves are well-portrayed, if inevitably a bit duller than all the ghosts and craziness going on around them.

Jeffery Jones does a good job as the jittery husband who just wants peace and quiet, dammit, even if he can’t quite abandon his shark-of-the-business-world instincts just yet. Catherine O’Hara is clearly having fun as Delia, who’s really the closest thing the film has to a genuine villain – she’s completely self-obsessed, and wants nothing more than to inflict her art-nouveau sensibilities on everyone, whether they want them or not. (She’d come off as hateful if it weren’t quite clear that she’s fueled by her galloping neuroses and perpetually on the edge of a nervous breakdown.) She’s helped in this by Otho (Glenn Shadix), her preening interior decorator/general guru, who never lets a chance for a purring putdown go by, and who is never on top of things, but always thinks he is.

The one everyone remembers best, though, is Lydia, and for good reason. This was Winona Ryder’s breakout role – she nails the part of the moody teenage girl whose only real friends are a pair of ghosts, which she’s totally fine with. She could so easily have been a total stereotype, but her character is given greater depths than that, for which we’re all grateful. Praise be to you, Winona, you kooky little shoplifting weird-girl, you.

Really, though, the main draw of Beetlejuice isn’t the characters – it’s the typically bizarre atmosphere that Burton creates. The afterlife waiting room and its freaky inhabitants, the desert of sandworms, the various hauntings and their aftermaths – this is what we watch Burton movies for, and the film delivers in spades.

Is it perfect? Well, no. I would have liked to have seen a little more of the title character – not much, just a scene or two – the movie drags a bit when it’s focused on the Deetzes and their hoity-toity ways, and the climax, while pretty cool, is over awfully quickly. But hey, for a film made early in a director’s career, it’s pretty freakin’ impressive, especially considering the director in question. Basically, it’s Burton at his Burtoniest, with a side-order of Michael Keaton going nuts. Who could ask for more? Say his name! Say it! SAY IT!

Michael Keaton!

Michael Keaton!

Michael Keaton!

…

Wrong name.

Andie’s rating: If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have had my little accident.

Andie’s review: Wow, I had forgotten how great a movie Beetlejuice was until I watched it again the other day. This movie has everything. Michael Keaton is wonderful as Beetlejuice, he’s really funny and plays the character just sarcastically enough so that he’s not too scary. It does have some spooky/scary parts to it, like when the main characters discover that they’re dead. And I love the depiction of the afterlife.

For those of you weirdos who haven’t seen Beetlejuice, it is the tale of boring old Adam and Barbara (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) who die in a car accident and are confined to their house for all eternity. The Deitzes, some yucky people from the city, move in and start tearing the house apart. Adam and Barbara want them out of the house, so they try to be scary.

They pretty much suck at it, but they do befriend the daughter, Lydia (Winona Ryder). When they enlist the help of Beetlejuice, the bio-exorcist, to get the people out of the house, he turns out to be really mean and scary and tries to take Lydia. So the ghosts defeat Beetlejuice and they make peace with the family and everybody’s happy.

Personally, I love the way Tim Burton made the afterlife. It was just weird enough, that I sort of believed it. Like every ghost has a case worker and a handbook for being dead. And I love the lame attempts Adam and Barbara make at scaring the living. They start out in sheets with holes cut out for eyes! That obviously doesn’t work, so they movie up to making a whole dinner party dance to The Banana Boat song (Which is my favorite scene, by the way. It makes me laugh everytime). And I also love Delia Deitz’ little minion Otho. He’s so cynical and pretentious that you can’t help but love him.

Beetlejuice is a must have for anybody’s film collection.

Intermission!

• This may be one of my favorite Danny Elfman movie themes
• Is Beetlejuice one word, or is it two like Beetle Juice, because the opening title and credits seem to suggest the latter?
• Adam hides out in the closet, heh
• That drop from the bridge isn’t that far and the creek’s water can’t be that deep… how did they both manage to die?
• The old guy who keeps telling his story even when Adam leaves
• The desert and worms trapping them in the house
• The Handbook for the Recently Deceased
• SANDWORMS INCIDENTS INCREASE
• The little cemetery model with Adam and Barbara’s funeral
• “Barb, honey, we’re dead. I don’t think we have much to worry about anymore.”
• Barbara taking her face off, cute moment
• “Deliver me from LL Bean!”
• “If you don’t let me gut out this house and make it my own, I will go insane and take you with me!”
• Claymation for the giant sand worm was a great idea
• Lydia wearing a mourning veil to dinner cracks me up so much
• “My whole life is one big dark room.”
• The Beetlejuice commercial
• The afterlife waiting room is so grotesquely cool — cigarette guy, head-shrunk guy, lady chopped in two, etc
• “It’s death for the dead.”
• “We’re very unhappy.” “What did you expect? You’re dead!”
• The way their case worker’s smoking comes out of the hole on his neck
• The fly yelling “help me! help me!”
• Lydia taking tons of Polaroids of the ghosts while mocking them
• “Live people ignore the strange and the unusual. I myself am strange and unusual.”
• Beetlejuice throwing his voice
• Otho calls it out that suicides end up as civil servant workers in the afterlife
• The calypso possession song is so wonderfully strange
• The dead football team too stupid to know they are dead
• Well he just murdered those two people
• I like that Lydia throws her bouquet down the hole after Beetlejuice