4. Beetlejuice (1988)
Beetlejuice is jammed with the kind of brilliant spontaneity that has disappeared entirely from Burton's recent filmmaking endeavours, replaced, instead, with a kind of calculated attempt at looking so. But
Beetlejuice is a deliriously brilliant and wacky entry in the filmmaker's canon, a movie that embraces its surrealness and doesn't slow down for a moment. With great performances from Alec Baldwin and Michael Keaton alike, Beetlejuice might just be Burton's most flat-out hilarious film. Granted, there are aspects to
Beetlejuice that threaten to date it all out of proportion (the yuppie dance sequence, for example), but ultimately the movie serves as springboard for Burton's imagination - and one might argue that it has never been in fuller force than right here in his second feature.