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Tim Burton's 1988 kids' movie horror/goof-fest might have impressed that era's young audiences with its stop-motion animation effects, but "Beetlejuice" is too scattershot with its humor to make much of an impression.
Tim Burton's use of surrealistic elements gives you a disorienting sense of time and place, and that is this movie's greatest gift; it takes you to weird, dystopic landscapes and atmospheres.
There are plenty of great sight-gags, but they only get the movie so far. The narrative development just isn't there.
At heart, "Beetlejuice" is a haunted house story, with Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin doing the ghostly honors.
Winona Ryder owns the picture with her insouciant Goth attitude.
In what equates to Ryder's big screen career (this is just her third film), you can clearly see her star shining bright behind those dyed black bangs.
Michael Keaton elevates the meandering script with sheer energy. Only Robin Williams could have come close to Keaton's over-the-top performance, and even he would have had a hard time matching it.
For kids' Halloween movie, "Beetlejuice" is a safe bet, but it won't go over as well with the adults.
Debatable though is the film's tone-deaf use of Calypso music.
Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does. This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.
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Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer draws upon his long history of theatrical experience working with marionettes in this mysteriously comic retelling of an ancient Czech fairy tale.
Svankmajer marvelously intermingles stop-motion animation with live-action to tell the tale of an infertile married couple obsessed with having a child, even if that child is a murderous monster made of tree root.
Husband Karel Horák (Jan Hartl) finds inspiration in a tree root that he shapes into the body of a genetically correct branch-limbed baby boy. Karel's wife Božena Horáková (Veronika Žilková) is overjoyed with the result. She hatches a plan involving nine handmade pillows of sequential sizes to publicly account for a gestation period that will allow her to act as a mother to the lifeless piece of wood. However, upon its "birth," Otik comes to life.
Alzbetka (Kristina Adamcova) is a precocious pre-teen girl, obsessed with sex and babies, who lives in the couple's apartment building. Her intense curiosity about Karel's and Božena's "baby" taps into the magical tale of "Otesánek," that Alzbetka reads in a book of fairy tales.
Weirdness prevails. Little Otik proves to be an insatiably hungry baby. The family cat is turned into a pile of bloody bones. Otik gradually grows to a gargantuan size. The mailman also becomes a victim. The strange child-creature takes on a serial killer identity. Daddy wants to chop baby into splinters, but mommy won't let him.
Svankmajer creates an undeniably original fairytale-tinged satire about the gruesome reality of childbirth and the tremendous social pressures that come with the duties of parenting. The picture resonates especially with David Lynch’s “Eraserhead.”
Božena's compulsory overprotection of a baby she can never allow her neighbors to see is a point of high humor. She takes to putting a plastic toy-baby in the pram she that leaves outside while she shops. Božena, you see, is overprotective only to a point.
Most striking is the bizarre baby itself. With its flattop head, frayed branch appendages, and snout-like nose, Otik makes a strong case for the ugliest infant you've ever seen. Still, in spite of its unsightly appearance and reprehensible behavior, Božena can't help but adore her creepy offspring.
Fairy tales are cautionary stories written to teach children hard lessons that most parents would rather not attempt to paraphrase. "Little Otik" is in a class all by itself. Jan Svankmajer is a mad genius of cinema. Nightmares may follow.
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British Claymation geniuses Nick Park and Steve Box bring to life their best-loved characters Wallace (voiced by veteran actor Peter Sallis) and his faithful tongue-tied dog Gromit in a nifty children’s movie filled with just the right amount of bawdy double entendres to make adults snicker.
Through a painstaking filming process that takes a full day to shoot, at most, two seconds of screentime the filmmakers create a vibrant rural British community obsessed with growing giant vegetables for their annual fairground competition.
Wallace and Gromit run a brisk pest control business called "Anti-Pesto" by humanely capturing garden-ravaging bunnies with Wallace’s specially invented Bun-Vac 6000 contraption that "sucks as well as blows."
But their Northern England clientele go wiggy when an enormous rabbit attacks their gardens during a harvest full moon to devour every gigantic vegetable in sight.
It’s "the world’s first vegetarian horror movie," but there’s nothing scary about it.
