BEETLEJUICE A COMEDY OF TERRORS
By Rob Salem
From The Toronto Star, 03.30.1988, Final Edition
A quaint little New England cottage has been taken over by strange,
malevolent forces; the peaceful, idyllic existence suddenly shattered,
transformed overnight into a sheer living hell.
Who you gonna call?
Well it ain't the Ghostbusters. Not when you're the ghost, and
the intruders you want busted are real human beings, or what
passes for real human beings in Beetlejuice, the twisted new
comedy opening today.
So who can you call? Well, when all else fails, you could call
Beetlejuice-- Betelgeuse, actually--freelance bio-exorcist, possession
and haunting specialist, an unpredictable and incredibly vulgar
fellow who looks an awful lot like what actor Michael Keaton
might look like if he were dead and had been left unrefrigerated
for a few 100 years.
You're gonna call Betelgeuse. And you're gonna immediately regret
doing so.
Because Betelgeuse is most definitely a last resort, even for
the dead - which is the condition the folksy young couple, Barbara
and Adam Maitland (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin), suddenly find
themselves in after an ill-fated trip to the hardware store.
Worse still, the charming home they have built and are now destined
to haunt for the next century or so has been purchased by the
world's most obnoxious yuppie family, the Deetzes--a condo-crazed
dad (Jeffrey Jones), his chronically depressed daughter (Winona
Ryder), and his laughably pretentious second wife (our own Catharine
O'Hara), who is intent on remaking the house in her own Manhattan
modern image.
The ghostly Maitlands are desperate. The standard-issue Handbook
For The Recently Deceased is no help, and neither is their chain-smoking
afterlife caseworker (Sylvia Sidney). Try as they might, they
can't quite get the hang of this haunting thing. And even once
they do, the Deetzes figure that living in a real haunted house
is perhaps the ultimate status symbol.
If this is all starting to sound a little bizarre, that's because
it is. A lot bizarre, actually. Once Beetlejuice gets moving,
with its wonky characters and its unbeliveably strange special
effects, the most unorthodox storyline is the most normal thing
about it.
Mind you, it does take its time gathering speed. Only when director
Tim Burton, a former Disney animator who previously directed
Pee Wee's Big Adventure, lets loose his effects team and their
array of vivid, cartoon-like visuals, does Beetlejuice come into
its own as a uniquely entertaining comedy of terrors.
Shrunken heads
Shrunken heads on full-sized bodies, wise-cracking traffic fatalities,
demonically possessed shrimp cocktails, faces being ripped from
skulls or stretched into ridiculous shapes, the many manifestations
of Betelgeuse himself--this stuff would be downright terrifying
if it weren't so darned funny.
The actors have merely to react to the bizarre goings-on--often,
they are not so much characters as they are props, though O'Hara
is quite delightful and Keaton, who has been so unlikeable (unintentionally)
in so many movies, here turns unlikeability into something of
an artform.
There's something strange in your neighborhood theatre. Who
you gonna call? For a good time, call Beetlejuice.
