Benjamin's Stash: Video Pick of the Week

      Hello, readers. It's time for my video pick of the week. This week's pick is one of my childhood favorites that still entertains me to this very day. Featuring a talented and funny cast, this film also made one of Hollywood's most eccentric directors into the hit filmmaker we know of today.

      Beetlejuice begins with Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara Maitland (Geena Davis), a couple from New England. While coming back home one day from town, Barbara swerves to avoid a dog wandering in the road and crashes through a covered bridge, plunging into the river. When both Adam and Barbara reach home, upon discovery of a book titled "Handbook for the Recently Deceased", they realize they may be dead. Things take an even bigger turn for the worse when their house is sold to an obnoxious family, former real estate developer Charles Deetz (Jeffrey Jones), his second wife Delia (Catherine O'Hara) and his daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder). Wanting to be rid of the new residents, they try to scare them away, but being the cute and quaint couple they are, it's nearly impossible for them to do so. That's when they reach out to Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), a freelance "bio-exorcist" ghost who's willing to do the job for the Maitlands.

      For such a relatively simple story, Beetlejuice is wonderfully original and creative. You tend to expect nothing less from Tim Burton. The set design and makeup effects are first rate, the latter of which won the Academy Award for its category in 1989. The great Danny Elfman's score (a common staple for Burton films) is both lively and haunting all at the same time, and the cast is uniformly hilarious. Michael Keaton, caked under a truckload's worth of makeup, is perfectly cast in the title role and displays just the right amount of crazy which contrasts very effectively against Baldwin and Davis's straitlaced couple. Winona Ryder, in her first breakout role, is terrific as the goth child Lydia that takes a liking to the Maitland couple, and no one, and I mean no one, can play smug and bitchy better than Catherine O'Hara. Over the top and bizarre, Beetlejuice is a film that relishes in its lunacy (the waiting room for the afterlife scene being similar to waiting tediously at the doctor's office is a great example). It's not Citizen Kane, nor does it try to be. It knows what it is, and succeeds in doing so, providing a perfect balance of comedy and horror that proves to be an entertaining and fun time.