Makes death look like a lot of fun

Rating: 8/10 (18 February 2008)

It's only his second movie, and yet it is obvious Beetle Juice is pure, unmistakable Tim Burton: macabre, darkly comic and crammed with weirdos, not least Michael Keaton's career-best performance as the perverted titular "bio-exorcist".
But what does a creature like that actually do? Well, it depends on who requires his services: in the case of Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis), a recently deceased married couple, he is supposed to get rid of the "terrible people" (Jeffrey Jones and Helen O' Hara) who have taken over their house. As his employers will soon discover, though, Beetlejuice doesn't exactly play by the rules and has an agenda of his own, a fact that could cause more damage than expected. Unless the new owner's daughter, the death-obsessed Lydia (Winona Ryder), finds a way to stop him, that is.
Burton was famously accused for favoring style over content in his two Batman films (fair assessment, but they're still awesome), something that can't be said of this black comedy: the visual element may be incredibly strong, especially in the fantasy sequences, but the director never loses track of the wonderfully witty script, taking the audience with him on a trip that, similarly to his later work Corpse Bride, paints a merrier portrait of the afterlife than we are used to imagine, albeit with the occasional grotesque scenarios and people.
Oddly enough, the extravagant imagery is also where the film shows its biggest limit, as some of the special effects have dated quite badly, most notably a stop-motion animated snake that attacks Adam and Barbara in an early nightmare scene. Such shortcomings, however, are compensated by the consistent twisted humor and a committed cast: Baldwin and Davis are amusing in roles few people would imagine them playing, Burton-regular Jones is a reliable source of laughs and Ryder's "troubled" teenager (not like her Heathers character, though) is a neat and charming counterpoint to her heartbreaking turn in Edward Scissorhands, also directed by Burton. But it is the underused Keaton (about 18 minutes of screen time in an almost two-hour long movie) who deserves the hot spot in the audience's memory: he is twitchy, rude, dirty and VERY naughty - nearly too much for a PG feature. And if that isn't enough, consider this: Burton wanted him and no one else to play Batman because of his work in this picture, and the result was the finest celluloid Dark Knight until Christian Bale took over the suit. That's gotta mean something, right?