Beetlejuice Review

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“Beetlejuice” is the kind of movie you watch when you’re not sober. Tim Burton’s trip of a film, released in ’88, throws you into a world where dead people are more alive than the living. Its plot is simple — a dead couple, played by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, tries to haunt their old house. But that’s just the frame to hang the weird on.

Michael Keaton plays Beetlejuice as if he’s been living on booze and cheap thrills in the afterlife. You can’t decide if you hate him or want to see more of him. But you do see more of him, and somehow he’s the guy who ties the whole thing together, even though he’s barely in it.

The movie is all over the place, set design looks like a hallucination, the music, the Danny Elfman score, makes everything feel like a carnival you got stuck in. But it works. It’s chaos that somehow doesn’t spin out of control. The humor is dark, real dark, but the kind that makes you laugh even when you shouldn’t.

The Maitlands, Baldwin and Davis, are about as wholesome as you can get. Small-town vibes, loving couple, big dreams of fixing up their old house until they drive off a bridge and crash into the river. It’s sudden, the way death usually is, and the movie doesn’t let you dwell on it. They’re back as ghosts before you’ve even caught up. But they don’t know how to be dead. 

Then in comes the Deetz family, city people, loud and obnoxious, exactly the kind you’d want to haunt. Catherine O’Hara, the mom, plays this neurotic art snob who wants to turn the house into some modern-art nightmare. And Lydia, played by Winona Ryder, is the goth daughter who looks like she was born for this role. She’s the only one who can actually see the Maitlands, and she’s probably more comfortable with the dead than with the living.

The rules of the afterlife are bureaucratic and absurd, like a waiting room where no one cares if you’re dead. The couple gets a handbook for the recently deceased, but it’s intentionally vague, like a tax form. They try to scare the Deetzes out of the house, but they’re bad at it, comically bad. 

And that’s when they call Beetlejuice. He’s a “bio-exorcist” with a taste for trouble. Keaton plays him like a degenerate who’s been partying for eternity. He’s wild, unpredictable, and completely deranged. Beetlejuice is . barely in the movie, but when he is, he owns every second.  Beetlejuice is the villain, but he’s the kind of villain that you kind of miss when he’s gone. The movie ends with a balance restored, the living and the dead coexisting, sort of. But it’s not a neat resolution, and it doesn’t need to be. ”Beetlejuice” is like a controlled chaos, more vibe than story, and that’s what makes it work. By the time it’s over, you feel like you just came down from something. You’re not sure what, but it’s left its mark. It’s messy, but in a way that makes sense, like how real life is messy. Only this time, with ghosts and sandworms.

Beetlejuice was exactly the kind of character the 1980s needed. The decade was filled with polished, larger-than-life heroes and sleek blockbusters, but Beetlejuice was the complete opposite, raw, grimy, and unapologetically chaotic. He represented the underbelly of the ’80s, the rebellion against the glossy, consumer-driven culture. At a time when Reagan-era ideals were all about image and control, Beetlejuice came in breaking every rule.  He didn’t care about being likable or even redeemable, which made him more honest than the shiny heroes of the time. In a decade that prized conformity, Beetlejuice gave people permission to embrace their weirdness and messiness, showing that the freaks and outcasts could be the real stars.

People can say Keaton is the star of Beetlejuice, but the true star of the film is Tim Burton.  ”Beetlejuice” is  the blueprint for understanding Tim Burton’s aesthetic, the key to unlocking that strange, dark world he’s built a career around. It’s all there, his fascination with the macabre, the outcasts, the absurdities of life and death. 

Start with the visuals. Everything is off-kilter, from the jagged lines of the Maitlands’ house after the Deetzes wreck it with modern art, to the crooked, surreal landscapes of the afterlife. Burton’s worlds never look quite real, they’re exaggerated, twisted, like something out of a dream or a nightmare. The way the afterlife is handled as a kind of depressing, bureaucratic purgatory feels almost like a joke on how we deal with death, but it’s also a reflection of Burton’s style, making the grim feel bizarrely alive.

And then there’s the characters. Burton loves his misfits, the ones who don’t fit in, and in “Beetlejuice” , everyone is out of place. The Maitlands can’t get the hang of being dead, the Deetzes don’t belong in the countryside, and Lydia, with her dark clothes and obsession with death. She’s that goth outsider who sees the world differently, and she’s not afraid of what everyone else is. If you want to understand Burton, you look at Lydiashe’s both the spectator and the heart of his universe. She’s the weirdo that sees the beauty in the grotesque.

Burton’s fascination with the grotesque is everywhere in ”Beetlejuice”. Look at the way the dead are portrayed, they’re decaying, mutilated, or stuck in the way they died, like that poor guy flattened by a truck. There’s something cartoonish about it, but it’s also grim. Even Beetlejuice himself is a perfect embodiment of Burton’s aesthetic. He’s disgusting, rude, and dangerous, but there’s something about him that’s charismatic in a twisted way. He’s the ultimate outsider, living in a world that doesn’t follow the rules, and he’s proud of it. That’s the core of Burton’s work.

And Burton’s sense of humor, that dark, almost morbid humor, is at its sharpest in “Beetlejuice”. The jokes are about death, decay, and the absurdity of existence, but they land because Burton never lets it get too heavy. There’s always a wink, like he’s in on the joke and he knows you are too. That’s what makes his aesthetic so unique—he takes dark subjects and makes them playful, turning horror into something fun. 

Tim Burton’s world is dark and quirky, but it never feels heavy. Even the dead are just trying to figure things out, like everyone else. The movie’s filled with these weird, unforgettable images—the sandworm in the desert of the afterlife, the dinner scene where shrimp cocktails attack, the sculptures that come to life. It’s all so strange, but there’s a logic to it, like it makes sense in the world Burton’s created, even if you don’t understand it fully.

Beetlejuice 2 came out September 2 and is in theatres now.