In celebration of Halloween, I previously reviewed The Evil Dead here on Horrors from Beyond the Netflix. Next up is the real life of the undead party, Tim Burton, and his 1988 bio-exorcist film, Beetlejuice.

Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments or suggest a Netflix instant streaming film that you’re curious about but would never, ever watch. (I’ll do that for you.)

Tim Burton is known for his weird knack for decorating relatively sane movies in gothic attire and making them the kinky, cross-dressing cousins of their series counterparts. If his style were a character, it would be Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice. Even with her death shroud and emo suicide letters, Lydia seems like a smart, nice girl you’d want to watch horror movies with on lazy nights. She’s not embarrassing, and neither are (most of) Burton’s films, like Edward Scissorhands and Corpse Bride. Make whatever you will of the recent, eye-boggling Alice in Wonderland, but Batman Returns was too gross and repulsive for me.

Danny Elfman composed the musical score.

Beetlejuice (or Betelgeuse for the technically picky), is a visually wacky and downright oddball film—one that probably fits more at home in the late ’80s than it ever will later generations, but it’s kooky enough to enjoy nowadays. Geena Davis and a skinny, spectacled Alex Baldwin play Barbara and Adam Maitland, two silly newlyweds who go tumbling into a river and wind up dead and disgruntled. They’re ghosts shacking up in their old country house, now sold to the highest bidders: a couple of “modern” city-dwellers who spray paint the walls for remodeling (who does that?) and bring along their pathologically moody daughter, Lydia (Winona Ryder).

Barbara and Adam try every parlor trick in their power to scare the unwanted house guests away, including throwing designer sheets over their heads and moaning through the halls (insert sex jokes). But the dead play by different rules, and thanks to a convenient handbook for the recently deceased and a trip through space-time, the couple soon learn there’s more to the afterlife than they could have guessed. If that sounds like stating the obvious, then bingo: that’s the movie in a nutshell. The handbook is full of such kernels like, “The living can’t normally see you.” Well, duh.

Whatever comes off as idiotic about the film’s characters and otherwise original plot is excused by its disturbing ventures into claymation and cool-looking, geometric scares that surely were cutting edge at some point in time … surely. Even better, the humor still works (even if it is dated), and best of all, Michael Keaton fuels much of the film’s energy without stealing it or diminishing the other performances (a complaint, interestingly enough, that circulated about Heath Ledger and The Dark Knight—nobody liked Bale’s scratchy throat voice, and all they wanted was more Goddamn Joker). It’s common knowledge that Keaton provided one of the earlier live-action portrayals of Batman, and that stoic playboy disappears when he slips into the role of Beetlejuice, the bio-exorcist who uses extreme tactics to banish the living from haunted homes.

For a film named after its eccentric character, it certainly doesn’t treat him well: Beetlejuice is a misogynistic, offensive pervert. Nobody really likes him or wants him hanging around, so they use him and lose him before he goes too crazy and poof, happy ending. Only the ending is actually rather nonsensical, showing a floating Lydia Deetz lip-singing to Harry Belafonte’s “Jump In The Line (Shake, Shake Senora)” with a zombie football-player foursome as backup dancers and her bothersome parents nowhere to be seen. Right. Anyway, Beetlejuice is still fun, and one of the better gems in Netflix’s instant streaming trove.

1989-91 Beetlejuice show on ABC