GHOSTS AND EXTRA EYEBALLS

By Janet Maslin

From The New York Times, 03.301988

Anyone whose idea of high wit can be achieved with bizarre latex facial makeup and extra eyeballs in unexpected places will at least admire Beetlejuice for its ingenuity. Tim Burton, who also directed Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, shows a keen grasp of preadolescent tastes in special effects (the weirder the better), pacing (illogical but busy) and comic constructs (only something incongruous, like people breaking into the "Banana Boat" song ("Day-O") for no reason, is funnier than something rude).

But for other audiences Beetlejuice, which opens today at the Criterion Center and other theaters, is about as funny as a shrunken head - and it happens to include a few. The big joke here is death, since the film's principals are a cute young couple named Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis) who are killed as the story begins. These two immediately return as ghosts, but Topper this isn't; sophisticated spirit-world humor is hardly the order of the day. So dim are Adam and Barbara that he has trouble reading properly and they both require about 20 minutes' worth of not finding their reflections in mirrors to realize they're not precisely in the pink.

Adam and Barbara are horrified to find their rustic house sold to a group of fey, obnoxious New Yorkers who are a great deal more ghoulish than the ghosts themselves, and so they do what they can to haunt the place and scare the new owners away. They try severing their heads and so forth, but when the new owners shriek, it's only over the lack of closet space. Into the midst of this standoff rides Michael Keaton as the title character, a "bio-exorcist" who emerges from the grave determined to appall everyone as much as he possibly can. He does this much too well.

Elaborate as this sounds, there really isn't much plot here, only a parade of arbitrary visual tricks to hold the film together. Mr. Keaton, for instance, appears in one scene with a tiny carousel atop his head, bat-wings coming out of his ears and huge, inflatable arms that turn into mallets. At another point, when asked if he can be scary, he sprouts Medusa-like snakes atop his head. And when he spins his head in another scene, he complains, "Don't you hate it when that happens?"

Mr. Burton, who seems to take his inspiration from toy stores and rock videos in equal measure, tries anything and everything for effect, and only occasionally manages something marginally funny, like a bureaucratic waiting room for the dead packed with very peculiar casualties (that shrunken head is one of them). His actors, not surprisingly, are limited by the stupidity of their material. Winona Ryder makes a good impression as the new owners' daughter, a girl much creepier than the ghosts themselves, and Glenn Shadix does what he can as their very arch decorator, but as the owners Catherine O'Hara and Jeffrey Jones are made to behave as dopily as Mr. Keaton himself. To affirm this couple's status as bores, Dick Cavett and Robert Goulet appear as their friends.