Ghost with the most

Rating: 7/10 (19 November 2009)

It takes a certain kind of childlike, ghoulish glee to extract the words 'Beetle Juice' from a red supergiant located 570 light-years from Earth - and Tim Burton films are nothing if not ghoulishly gleeful.
Michael Keaton (born Michael Douglas, but someone had to move aside, and it wasn't going to be the son of Spartacus) is in career-best mode as the wiseass bio-exorcist ("I've seen The Exorcist about 167 times and it keeps getting funnier every single time I see it!!"), self-interestedly aiding dead couple Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis through the afterlife. A place that owes less to German Romanticism (with its heavenly mountains and lakes) than German Expressionism (with its angular shadows and skewed corridors straight out of The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari).
Of all Burton's early works, this must be the most fun (Pee-Wee Herman just looks increasingly dodgy and weird), and certainly contains the most imaginative use of a Harry Belafonte number, aside from the Muppets' take on 'The Banana Boat Song'. Appropriately, for a film and a character named after a star, Burton's singular take on the haunted house picture rocketed both director and Keaton into the stratosphere.