Hilarious Hi-Jinks Movie Of Cute Ghostly Couple Trying To Evict Noisy Cityfolk

Rating: 7/10 (22 November 2010)

The Maitlands own a lovely house in the countryside. When they die in a car accident they become ghosts and must haunt it for a century. To make matters worse, the house is bought by the less-than-lovable Deetz from the big city. Can the Maitlands somehow use their spook smarts to get rid of the new tenants ?
This movie is in equal parts charming, funny, crazy and touching, and although he had made one feature before it (Pee-wee's Big Adventure), it's really an introduction to The Crazy World Of Tim Burton. This is a universe of engaging, interesting characters - a lonely teenage girl, a wholesome Norman Rockwell couple, a frustrated would-be artist - but also a film where dead citizens need to find the right office to process their claim to the afterlife, bad sculptures start moving and attack people, and the groom at a climactic wedding scene removes a severed finger from the ring in his pocket with assurances to his bride-to-be that, "She meant nothing to me !". Burton has an almost unique knack of combining his wacky ideas and insane visuals with solid entertainment values; homespun humour, agreeable drama and wry observations. Even if the messages in his movies are as simple as it's good to listen to some Harry Belafonte once in a while, they're delivered with panache and are more profound than a lot of so-called grown-up films aspire to be. The whole cast here are obviously having a ball, and Keaton is motormouth hilarious in the showstopping part, but for me the two best players are sixteen-year-old Ryder in the pivotal role of Lydia, who manages to be both hilarious ("I, myself, am strange and unusual.") and tender, and O'Hara as the wicked stepmom whose rendition of Day-O alone is worth seeing the whole movie for. Speaking of music, this is also composer Danny Elfman's calling card film - starting with a delicious brass-thumping main theme, it's shot through with outstanding musical moments which get progressively weirder and more operatic as the mayhem surges. A note about the title of this film, which I must confess I don't quite understand. According to IMDb, it's formally Beetle Juice (two words), despite the fact that the title card for the movie has it written as one word, and it surely comes from the character, whose name is not only definitely one word, but is also spelled Betelgeuse (as in the star in the constellation of Orion). I smell the stench of movie executives who can't even read let alone spell. Brilliantly written by Larry Wilson, Warren Skaaren and Michael McDowell (a great horror scribbler, who also worked on George A. Romero's Tales From The Darkside movie / TV show, adapted The Nightmare Before Christmas and scripted Stephen King's novel Thinner), this is a fabulously funny feelgood spook story.