Back in 1988, Beetlejuice was a comedy, a ghost story, an adventurous horror film and a macabre rollercoaster ride, all fueled by a new kind of palm-buzzer freak-show shenanigans. I first saw the film at a Saturday night preview before anyone knew anything about it, and by the time it was over, it was clear that director Tim Burton was going to be a superstar, ruling over his own strangely passionate world of macabre derision.
Burton had made Pee-wee’s Big Adventure when he was 26, but Beetlejuice, although in some ways a shabby cartoon, had a power in it. One could say that Beetlejuice was a Mood. The vision of the afterlife as a wax museum waiting room of horrors; the moment when the shrimp jump off the plate in the spectacular musical “Day-O” sequence of demonic possession; and Michael Keaton’s wild, babbling, Groucho-Marx-meets-dripping-scarred portrayal of the sleazy bio-exorcist Beetlejuice – the film channeled a spirit that was not only wacky but also hilariously funny.
It’s the nature of the brand Tim Burton has become that when you watch Beetlejuice, his let’s relive it all 36 years later, because why the hell not? sequel that opened the Venice Film Festival today, you can almost see him at work, putting the pieces together, trying to recapture that old Burton lightning in a bottle. One of those pieces is the image of Monica Bellucci as Delores, a hacked-to-pieces ghost slumbering in various boxes while she literally tucks and staples her body parts together (torso, legs and arms sawed off, face cut in half), all to the tune of the Bee Gees’ Tragedy, which half makes sense—I guess there’s supposed to be something tragic about her?—but that mostly just works as an ideal madcap pinprick. Then she wanders around and sucks the souls of the dead, which she Really dead. (Did I mention she’s Beetlejuice’s ex-wife? It’s complicated.)
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice starts off a little awkwardly, with Burton portraying his characters as if they were part of a Beetlejuice board game. As the film progresses, however, the pieces fall into place in the same way that Delores’ face and body fit together. The film is just a slight variation on Beetlejuice — a piece of fan service, really. It doesn’t offer the full monster kitsch jolt that the original film did. Still, there’s good fan service and bad, and as stilted and silly as it can be at times, I had a pretty good time watching Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Burton’s once-warped view of the world was seared into ours long ago (which is one reason he sometimes struggled to give his films the same kick). But even though “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” – like the current successful Broadway version of “Beetlejuice” – is primarily a joke, the new film also offers honest nostalgia for the moments when Burton’s sensibility for a clown ghost from hell still had a certain shock value.
As a result, it is one of those sequels that has a much of time, looking back. The film opens with the tingle of Danny Elfman’s edgy ghost score, along with another shot of the quaint Connecticut town of Winter River, where Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz, the former goth teenager who had a connection to the spirit world, is now a psychic mediator who hosts her own television show about hunting the paranormal called “Ghost House.” Lydia still sports spiky bangs, but where you might expect her to have relaxed with middle age, the way Ryder plays her makes her seem more disturbed than ever. Perhaps that’s because her boyfriend, Rory (Justin Theroux), is a goofy creep who speaks in therapeutic gibberish to cover up his blatant opportunism. Or maybe it’s because her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) has nothing but contempt for her mother’s ghostly activities, which she believes are pure delusion.
Catherine O’Hara is back as Delia, Lydia’s narcissistic stepmother and artist. And to overcome any awkwardness over former cast member Jeffrey Jones (now a convicted sex offender), his character Charles – Lydia’s father and Delia’s husband – gets an animated segment that ends with him being eaten by a shark; the rest of the film is spent skulking through the afterlife as a headless, blood-spurting trunk. As for Keaton’s titular pest, he keeps popping into Lydia’s line of sight, and it’s not long before he’s summoned. Keaton, at 73, brings the same obscene, grinding energy and superficial, sleazy cunning to him – and indeed, Beetlejuice finds another way to force Lydia to marry him. It all has to do with the fact that Astrid has fallen in love with a cute guy from her class (Arthur Conti), who, as it turns out, has a very dark secret.
The film really comes to life when Beetlejuice appears as Lydia and Rory’s
“Couples Therapist,” literally pours his heart out, then presents a childlike version of himself—a baby as disturbing as the one crawling on the ceiling in “Trainspotting.” A move like this exists mostly for its own sake, pleasantly sick, and that’s the aesthetic of “Beetlejuice” in its own way: Tim Burton just makes this stuff up because it tickles his naughty imagination. At least one thing he made up is a little embarrassing: the “soul train” pun, complete with a boogie-down chorus by ’70s funk dancers (which becomes a train for dead souls in the film—get it?). And the plot has even more of the balsa-wood quality that the Alec Baldwin-Geena Davis ghost plot had in “Beetlejuice.”
But after a while the ideas gain momentum and mesh with one another, whether it’s Bob, the goggle-eyed shrunken head in a full-body suit who watches over an army of Bobs in the office; or Willem Dafoe exploring the kitsch of Wolf Jackson, a former B-movie actor with his left brain now exposed (as a result of a grenade accident) who runs the afterlife police while pretending he’s still starring in a bad movie; or the film’s cheeky homages to the black-and-white era of Mario Bava and the dreamy angst of “Carrie”; or the hypnotic gem of inspired madness that Burton delivers during the climactic wedding scene with Richard Harris’s 1968 rendition of “MacArthur Park.” “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” isn’t “Beetlejuice,” but it ends up having just enough Burton character.
