I Watch Films: Beetlejuice

 

Beetlejuice

Adam and Barbara live in a large house in the country, though their realtor neighbour thinks they should sell it and get somewhere smaller. In the attic they’re building a model of the town. One night while out driving they go off the bridge into the river. They get home with no knowledge of how they got there; they can’t leave, no one can see them and there’s a handbook for the recently deceased. It turns out they’re dead.

The realtor sells the house to Charles Deetz, up from New York, hoping to do some real estate developing. With him is his wife Delia, a sculptor, his daughter Lydia, a goth and Otho, an interior decorator. They proceed to turn the house from homely into a post-modern art space. Barbara and Adam hate this, inspect the handbook, find an advert for “Beetlejuice.”

They discuss matters in the otherworld bureaucracy with their caseworker Juno, who tells them that they have to stay in the house for 125 years, that everything they need to know is in the handbook, and definitely don’t call on Betelgeuse who causes problems (and used to be her assistant. They try to scare the new owners from the house. In despair they summon Betelgeuse by saying his name three times. He appears in the model of the town, they don’t like him and leave. Lydia is the only one who can see them, but they do some haunted house stuff at a dinner party. Unfortunately the guests like it and suggest making the house into a theme park.

Lydia discovers Betelgeuse, tries to bargain with him for passage to the afterlife. Otho discovers the handbook, tries to summon Adam and Barbara. Betelgeuse is unleashed, for a chaotic final sequence.

All this is fine in a comic way, though it keeps skating over the darkest bits. Lydia wants to die because she’s a goth and her step-mother is bad? Seems unpleasant. Adam and Barbara are trapped in the afterlife, their beloved house turned into something ridiculous is treated as tragedy. I don’t know.

Watch This: Madcap dark ghost comedy
Don’t Watch This: Spends a lot of time building up to a fairly confused ending