Off-List: Beetlejuice
If you are a ghost and somebody have moved into your beloved
old home and are making a mess of things, who’re you gonna call? Ghostbu... no
no... Betelgeuse! (or Beetlejuice if you are so inclined). This fantastic and
hilarious reverse of ”Ghostbusters” is my third off-List movie for 1988.
The Maitlands, Barbara and Adam (Geena Davis and Alec
Baldwin), live in a cozy country house in Connecticut when they have the
misfortune to die in a car accident. They are slow to realize they are dead and
even slower to work out what that implies as the “Handbook for the Newly
Deceased” is particularly cryptic. They do realize they cannot leave the house
without ending up on Saturn’s moon Titan, which is infested with colourful
sandworms.
Their second disaster is the new owners of the house, the
Deetz’es, Delia and Charles (Catherine O’Hara and Jeffrey Jones) and Charles’
daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder). Charles is a developer looking for a quiet place
while Delia is a sculpturer and very impressed with herself. Lydia is a goth
girl living in perpetual misery. With those parents I am not certain I blame
her. Delia’s art friend, agent or leech, Otho (Glenn Shadix), practically moves
in with them. Right from day one they are busy changing the house in the most
horrendous, but likely fashionable, way and the Maitlands want them out. The
only place they have for themselves is the attic.
Lydia befriends the Maitlands as she is the only one who can
see them and when their first serious attempt to scare them away fails (the
famous Banana Boat Song scene), Lydia becomes the unwilling intermediary as the
Deetz’es see great possibilities in a haunted house. It is time to get serious
so, against advice from their caseworker, the Maitlands summon Betelgeuse
(Michael Keaton) and this is where it gets really funny.
I was surprised how late in the movie Betelgeuse appears. I
recall it as much earlier, but it is really only the last 20 minutes or so we
get the fireworks which this bio-exterminator is. Sure, he pops up before, but only
as hardly more than a mention. Betelgeuse is what everybody remembers from this
movie and Keaton went all in on this character. He is repulsive and offensive,
but also a hilariously funny clown. The uncle nobody wants to invite to the party,
but all the children love. Well, who all the adolescent boys love.
It is true that the movie pulls into high gear when Keaton
shows up, but what we forget is that this is already quite a feast. The Otho
character is so sleazy and slimy that he is a hoot, and Jones did everything
right back then in the eighties. Despite Keaton, my favourite scene of the
movie is the Banana Boat Song sequence. Watching those pompous narcissistic bozos
succumb to the song is always a laugh for me and it was heavily referenced in
the sequel. The Maitlands’ visits to the afterlife are also legend. This messy
place that looks like a Kafkaesque nightmare is all we fear about public sector
bureaucracy. Being number 1000000 in the queue, a caseworker who do not have
time for you. Paper and dust everywhere. Regulations nobody understand and
catch-22s that means you are pretty much stuck. Dying sucks because this is where
you end up.
Ryder’s Lydia is the heart of the movie, and she is fine and
everything, but in this party everybody is having she is drowning out a bit. Her
function is mainly as the only truly sane person among all these weirdos, the
sounding box to make everybody else funny.
Only recently a sequel was made (it took 36 years!) and
despite my fears of the opposite, it works surprisingly well. Keaton’s Betelgeuse
gets a far more prominent role in that one, but it is otherwise faithful to the
original. It works well as a double feature to watch them together.
“Beetlejuice” carries all the hallmarks of Tim Burton, the primary
colours, the imagination and the larger than life characters and the crazy
thing is, this was only his second feature. I would add this to the List without
hesitation.
