Director – Tim Burton – 1988 – US – Cert. 15 – 92m
***1/2
A recently deceased couple hire a bio-exorcist to rid their former house of its new, yuppie occupants – review originally published in Samhain, 1988
Whilst its opening shot recalls the aerial opening of The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) segueying into that of The Witches Of Eastwick (George Miller, 1987), this film has been described as a reworking of Ghostbusters (Ivan Reitman, 1984) and The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) (!) from the ghost’s point of view. The plot concerns a couple (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) who die and then find that their house – which they have to live in as ghosts – is bought by an horrific collection of yuppie trendies.
The couple try to carry on as normal, picking up the occasional useful tip from a weighty tome entitled ‘The Handbook for the Recently Deceased’ (or diseased, as they first pronounce it!) and despite warnings from their afterlife caseworker Juno (played by veteran Hollywood actress Sylvia Sidney) they decide to employ the self-styled bio-exorcist Beetlegeuse (Michael Keaton) to frighten off the new occupants.
The single most memorable image of Beetlejuice is that of a desert landscape peopled by sea monster-like worms, reminiscent of nothing so much as a surrealist version of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Here, though, the worms open their jaws to reveal further heads within.
Other startling images abound. A fly screams a high-pitched “help me, help me” (after the protagonist of The Fly, Kurt Neumann, 1958) as it is sucked into the ground by a corpse in a model village; a ghostly Geena Davis is ignored by a live character as she rips off her face to reveal eyeballs, skull and tissue underneath. Bizarre, pretentious sculptures come to life like living, three foot organisms.
Heaven has never been seen like this before. Brightly coloured corridors, all weird angles and confusing perspectives, resemble nothing so much as a UPA cartoon of the fifties. Before reaching these though, we get to see the reception area which looks suspiciously like your local DHSS office, and seems about as efficient. On one end of a sofa sits a beautiful silky pair of girl’s legs, which end at the waist with what one assumes to be a pretty severe chainsaw injury. On the other sits her sulking, severed torso.
Elsewhere, a man in a safari outfit with a shrunken head waits to be seen. We remember an earlier remark about people in this life who commit suicide becoming civil servants in the next when the lady behind the counter’s wrists are briefly glimpsed with a scar across each, while a flat bureaucrat moves around by means of a horizontal wire and a pulley system attached to his shoulders.
The host of yuppie art lovers who move into the deceased couple’s house are for the most part little more than caricatures. The one exception is their daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder), arguably the single most interesting character in the film. She dresses like a punkette and comes out with wonderfully pessimistic lines like, “my whole life is like a view through a darkened window”, and is the only person who can see the ghosts because she is psychic.
Lydia is also the only person to really understand the ghost couple, and as such inspires our sympathy. Unfortunately, the misjudged ending has her become more cheerful about life – nothing wrong with that, but she switches from this fascinating outsider to a rather ordinary, bland looking girl who attends school. There’s no way of equating this shift from radically different individual to boring conformist with Lydia’s character, and it stinks.
The movie has done incredibly well at the US box office, and will no doubt give a boost to Geena Davis’ career, but I can’t help thinking that her character as scripted lacks the depth of other roles she’s been cast in – she’s a lot more memorable in The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986), for example.
There’s a much bigger problem in terms of the title character. The build up to Beetlegeuse’s entrance is terrific, but he never lives up to it. In fact, once he has appeared about half an hour in, the film plummets rapidly and seemingly loses its way. A pity, since director Tim Burton (a former Disney animator who also directed Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, 1985, with Pee Wee Herman) is extremely talented even if his work doesn’t completely hang together all of the time.
Review originally published in Samhain, 1988.
Trailer: