Beetlejuice (1988) Now we’re cooking with gas. This in my opinion is the first truly “Tim Burton” film. This film teamed him with production designer Bo Welch to create the Tim Burton visual style with the odd angles, shadows, and black and white color scheme, and composer Danny Elfman returns to perfect the Tim Burton sound with a great musical score. The plot involves a husband and wife passing away and being confined to their house as ghost meanwhile a new family, featuring a ball of nerves husband just wanting to relax, a pretentious alternative artist step-mother, and everybody’s favorite goth girl Lydia Deetze played by Winona Ryder, moves in to their chagrin and they come across the title character to rid them of the new family. Michael Keaton as the title character really steals the show. He’s such a force of character and personally it often shocks people that he’s only in it for at total of 17 and a half minutes. A much different version of his character and Lydia would go on to star in another staple of my childhood, the Beetlejuice animated series, admittedly that series didn’t age as well as other shows I watched. Apart from Keaton the movie’s not really laugh out loud funny but it has a macabre sense of humor throughout. The best example being the waiting room scene featuring patients whose physical forms reflect how they died in great detail including being flattened by a car, sawn in half, and burnt to a crisp all while just carrying on. The characters are fun, the special effects while out-dated are charming to look at, and overall just a good time. Back in 1988 it blew people away simply because no one had ever seen a film like this before and it still holds up. BTW there have been recent rumors of a sequel in the works, but they tried that already. Tim Burton was asked to pitch a sequel so he proposed “Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian” as it was the worst idea he could think of off the top of his head and just like he wanted it lingered for a while and then died a horrible death in production hell. See this film and you will get Tim Burton.
Posted on: Wed, 02 Oct 2013 14:02:04 +0000
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