Cute

Rating: 6/10 (5 January 2016)

A house-owning couple (Baldwin and Davis) in New England are killed in an auto accident, but show up as fully fleshed ghosts confined to their old house. A new couple, the sculptress manquÃ© O'Hara and the real estate flipper Jones, buy the house, reshape its classic lines with egregious appurtenances, and throw out the old furniture and fill the house with post-modern junk -- and O'Hara's monstrous sculptures.
The ghosts want to get rid of the new owners but can't seem to scare them, so they hire a rogue bio-exorcists named Beetlejuice (Keaton). Everything goes crazy.
Well, that's the story, insofar as anyone can make out a story. It begins promisingly enough, diverting and funny, but the plot line gets lost and it turns into a special effects extravaganza.
I wonder if, in 1988, computer-generated graphics were a polished device because they seem a little clumsy here sometimes -- as when Baldwin runs around holding his head in his hand.
The characters are all well done though. Sylvia Sidney as Baldwin's and Davis' "case worker" is a hoot. She plays it like an irritable New York Jew who inhales her cigarette smoke and exhales it through the fissure in her throat. Michael Keaton, my co-star in the superb artistic and commercial hit, "The Squeeze", brings a vulgar kind of life to every scene he's in. The guy and the character are really animated. His head spins like a dredl, he turns into a dragon, and he does a television commercial advertising his skills, and it's a peerless parody of Cal Worthington and his auto dealership. Calvin Cooledge Worthington may be a more familiar name to those living in Southern California. You couldn't get away from him anymore than you could get away from a television set.
That brief jibe is only one of several that are funny. "Hell" turns out to be a garish, purple waiting room with revolting Musak and people who took a ticket and are waiting their turn, only the office is now serving Number Three and your ticket is in the millions. At an apt moment the music turns into the shrieking violins of "Psycho," though that's no longer very original.
Alas, the story does wind up derailed, the eviction of the new tenants discarded, and what follows makes little sense. The incidents seem like an excuse for excess and aren't linked together by any sort of human logic.
But when it rings the bell, it sparkles for a moment. Daughter Winona Ryder can't wake her mother up because "she's sleeping with Prince Valium."