Funeral March to a Calypso Beat BEETLEJUICE

By RICHARD CORLISS

SoHo chic has come to Winter River. Charles and Delia Deetz are hosts of their premiere dinner party in the charming old Connecticut house they have just bought. The Deetzes' teenage daughter Lydia, who dresses like Carolyn Jones in The Addams Family, sulks in the corner. The conversation fizzes, then fizzles; the guests shift uneasily. Time for a little . . . Day-o! Day-ay-ay- o! Daylight come and me wan' go home! What? Delia has risen and, to the astonishment of all, begun singing Harry Belafonte's banana-boat hit of 30 years past. Work all night on a drink of rum! Now the entire party, pulsing with the calypso beat, dances around the table like frenzied Jamaican dockworkers. Lift six-foot, seven-foot, eight-foot bunch! Monstrous arms spring out of the shrimp tureens and leech onto the faces of the revelers. Who on earth has possessed them?

Must be the Maitlands -- Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis) -- the ghosts of the house's previous owners, who died a while back and now reside in the attic. This nice postmortem couple is no happier than Lydia (Winona Ryder) to be trapped here with trendy Charles (Jeffrey Jones) and the unspeakable Delia (Catherine O'Hara). So the Maitlands have been trying to scare the Deetzes away. Sorry, kids. Go ahead and haunt these New Age parvenus; they'll just invite their friends to enjoy the kicky spectacle. The Maitlands need some serious help, perhaps from the lecherous demon (Michael Keaton) who pesters them with the slogan "Unhappy with Eternity? Call Betelgeuse." Beetlejuice to you.

Hard times have fallen on the facetious fantasy. A genre that flourished a few years ago (Gremlins, Ghostbusters) is now box-office poison (Innerspace, Made in Heaven). Moviegoers want their nightmares straight these days, with guns and badges attached. A pity, because there is life left in the comedy of the supernatural. The form can liberate narrative wit and design ingenuity; it encourages filmmakers to plunder all the medium's resources, to create something that can exist only in the movies. Check out, for instance, Beetlejuice's vision of the afterlife -- it's hell as a strangled bureaucracy. In the waiting room, where the exit signs read NO EXIT, the dead still carry scars of their demise. A magician's assistant, who has been fatally sawed in half, occupies two seats on a couch. The social worker who runs the place is clearly overworked; she has an alarm on her wristwatch that plays Chopin's Funeral March in ricky-tick time.

Director Tim Burton (Pee-Wee's Big Adventure) has some poignant points to make about, well, life: that the dead must teach the living to savor it. Mostly, though, he wants to give good fun, to turn Winter River into West Eastwick, to ransack pop culture for references to everything from Topper to Tiny Alice. And to give Michael Keaton the chance to run productively wild. Keaton's Beetlejuice is a deliciously loathsome creature, whether shouting insults, lunching on insects or, in the film's climactic wedding scene, pulling a ring off a severed, shriveled finger and muttering to his bride, "I tell ya, honey, she meant nuthin' to me at all." Beetlejuice means something good: that imaginative artists can bring a fading genre back from the dead.