There was every reason to approach Beetlejuice Beetlejuice with the trepidation of the owner of a haunted house opening a creaking attic door. The original Beetlejuice is now 36 years old, one of those eternal audience favorites that has achieved the status of a confirmed classic without actually being a great film. Tim Burton’s debut film from 1985 Pee-Wee’s Big Adventureanother long-running hit, is probably a more coherent and consistently funnier film. But with Beetlejuice 1988 saw the first full revelation of the Burton sensibility, a set of aesthetic and thematic preferences that seemed original, irreverent and fresh at the time: neo-Gothic fashion, macabre black humor and an almost expressionist sense of production design.
Burton’s comedy-horror mashup depicted the afterlife as a sprawling, inefficient bureaucracy teeming with creepy oddities (zombies, mummies, the long-dead in various states of decomposition, newly arrived victims of every imaginable bloody mishap, and, of course, the titular demon spirit, played with gonzo relish by Michael Keaton). The rules by which this underworld functioned may not have been entirely clear—in 21stWhile the film was not a triumph of worldbuilding from a 20th-century perspective, the visual and aural delights it offered, with the help of sophisticated puppetry and prosthetics and everything the late 1980s had to offer in the way of practical effects, were more than enough to create a complete Tim Burton experience.
In the three and a half decades since then, the Burton experience has become a brand (not to mention a seasonal attraction at Disney theme parks) – and not necessarily one that reliably means quality. After a series of good to excellent films in the 1990s (Batman And Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood), Burton became a prolific director of high-budget, CGI-filled trash films, at times seeming to parody his own over-the-top style while participating in the IP mining trend at its worst (Planet of the Apes, Alice in Wonderland, Dumbo). There were exceptions, like his charming 2012 remake of his own early stop-motion short film. Frankenweeniebut it’s safe to say that even in some of his most commercially successful ventures of the last 20 years or so, Burton rarely felt swept away by the material – which meant that his work was often more unnerving than invigorating to watch.
That’s why it was so refreshing to go in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and I’m entertained, amused and, if not necessarily frightened, at least utterly disgusted by the gnarly fantasy of its paranormal world-within-a-world. The screenplay, credited to Alfred Gough, Miles Millar and Seth Grahame-Smith, shows signs of being the result of multiple drafts in the 30-plus years since a sequel was first proposed: It spans no fewer than four separate storylines, and contains entire characters (such as a dead actor who becomes a cop in the afterlife, played by a Willem Dafoe who gives it his all) that easily could have been cut without affecting the plot – but then you wouldn’t have Willem Dafoe with his skull half missing staging a raid on a cemetery with a zombie SWAT team.
But despite the overly complex story, the sequel is characterized by a satisfying simplicity. Even if it is not quite as lively as the 92-minute original, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice runs well at 104 minutes. Burton understands what the Beetlejuice-loving audiences want (Keaton wreaking supernatural havoc, Winona Ryder scowling in gothic chic, jump scares with eyeballs popping out of heads) and delivers it in gleeful abundance without confronting us with long origin stories or cumbersome explanations of franchise lore.
The film includes a few brief flashbacks to show how various characters met their ends. The film opens with a clever claymation sequence depicting the grim fate of Charles Deetz (originally played by Jeffrey Jones, now a convicted sex offender, who is one of the few main cast members not to return). Catherine O’Hara is back as Charles’ now widowed Delia Deetz, once the scorned stepmother of Ryder’s disillusioned teenager Lydia. A generation later, the two women tolerate each other for the sake of Lydia’s own teenage daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega). Lydia, whose paranormal abilities once enabled her to be the only one in her family to see ghosts, now works as a professional “psychic mediator” and hosts a sensationalist television show about real haunted houses. Still traumatized by the hauntings of her own childhood home long ago, Lydia is a neurotic wreck. She’s half-against her will forced into an engagement to her sleazy producer Rory (Justin Theroux), and dismissed by her daughter as a delusional imposter. But fans of the dark, death-obsessed Lydia Deetz – and the comeback of the long-missed Ryder in recent years – will be pleased to hear that Lydia still has spiky black bangs, an enviable vintage wardrobe and charm that oozes. We know right away that a slick imposter like Rory isn’t good enough for Lydia, because honestly, who could be?
This extension of the Beetlejuice-verse also includes some new characters, notably Delores (played by Monica Bellucci, the international star who is also now Burton’s girlfriend), a former Italian aristocrat who spent much of the afterlife dismembered and crammed into individual wooden boxes. In a bravura early scene, she manages to free her long-separated components and reunite piece by piece as she laboriously staples herself back together. The film has no shortage of these kinds of gross-out visual gags: As before, the afterlife’s waiting rooms are filled with fresh corpses whose physical state tells us everything we need to know about their final moments on earth, including but not limited to a guy who died in the middle of a hot dog eating contest.
Although the title doubles as the name of the shady antihero Beetlejuice, the character is less central to the sequel than the anxious but well-meaning Lydia, who at the beginning of the film can’t quite understand why she feels so out of control of her life. Without getting too self-serious about the central “trauma plot,” Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is essentially the story of a middle-aged woman coping with grief, with a mother-daughter story whose resolution, which could have been cheesy, actually feels earned. When Lydia’s daughter Astrid becomes embroiled in supernatural machinations through a flirtation with a bookish neighborhood boy (Arthur Conti), Lydia must descend, Orpheus-style, into the underworld to rescue her. This not only provides a high-stakes motive for an extended chase, but also an excuse to visit a wild profusion of afterlifescapes, from a surrealist desert filled with black-and-white striped sandworms to a Soul Train full of disco dancers.
I don’t want to overestimate Beetlejuice Beetlejuicewhich is actually just a better than expected sequel with the heart in the right place. But with the strong craftsmanship of former Burton collaborators such as costume designer Colleen Atwood and production designer Mark Scruton – and thanks to a snappy film score by Burton’s almost constant collaborator Danny Elfman, who always not three Burton films have been shot – Burton seems to be having fun behind the camera for the first time in a long time. Another key to the film’s success are the performances by comedians as top-notch as Keaton, who brings an anarchic charisma all his own to his repulsive ghoul, and the always brilliant Catherine O’Hara, whose every other line elicited audible laughter at the preview I attended. That screening was attended by a number of young fans in full Beetlejuice cosplay: Lydias in long black coats and zigzag bangs, Beetlejuices in neon green scary wigs and zebra-striped suits, corpses in various stages of decomposition. That a 36-year-old film can still generate such a level of audience engagement from viewers who weren’t even born when it was released is enough to make you believe in sequels again – or at least make you welcome the return of a good Tim Burton, just in time for scary Season.
