Beetlejuice (1988)

 

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.