Wonderfully Weird

Rating: 8/10 (6 November 2010)

Bringing an usual concept to a movie, Tim Burton has his ideal romantic leads killed-off in the first 5 minutes. Both go to town alive, and arrive home as ghosts. They are slow to realise this. Worse still, their perfect country home is rapidly sold on to the couple from hell. These are a pair of freaky-fashionable stiff-necked city snobs. He is recovering from a nervous breakdown and would be happy to leave things as they are, but his neurotic wife has artistic delusions and means to gut the place. To the ghosts, that won't do.
They mean to haunt 'em out. But, being novices, they're not sure how. Enter an unrecognisable Micheal Keaton as the titular 'Beetle Juice'. He is a free spirit with a wicked turn, and a freelance exorciser of humans. The couple are torn between his anarchic services and more conventional haunting; to this end, they seek counsel with the spirit world.
The movie is showing its age in terms of special-effects (but at least they are not CGI); even so, a lot of ingenuity was employed in bringing this work to life, and for the most part they still work. There are some very imaginative and comic touches - especially in the after-life, where victims of a variety of grisly deaths await their turn with necromantic bureaucracy. Sight gags and comic lines abound.
Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis adequately play the short-lived couple and other players give a decent turn for their paycheques. But this is Keaton's movie. His performance is so over-the-top as to match Jack Nicholson's Joker in 'Batman'. He is hilarious and demonstrates great comic timing. The music and sound effects are in general well suited, but I thought numbers like the Banana Boat Song a little jarring.
This is a ghost story movie like no other. Despite the slightly outdated effects, it is well worth a watch. In fact, I am beginning to find CGI a little passe these days, and prefer well-crafted 'old fashioned' effects. You at least know lots of people have really burnt the midnight oil to bring their ideas to fruition, instead of just a team of nerds churning them out on computers.