Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Thirty-six years after we left Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) finally enjoying life with the Maitlands, the ghosts who’d called up the bio-exorcist Betelgeuse to get her father Charles and pretentious sculptor stepmother Delia (Catherine O'Hara) out of their beloved Winter Hill home, she’s a traumatized wreck. She hosts a TV show called ‘Ghost House’ from New York City resulting in a strained relationship with her teenaged daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) who doesn’t believe in ghosts and hates the attention; she’s popping pills because she’s starting to see her old rotting suitor stalking her and her producer, Rory (Justin Theroux), is pushing her into marriage. But when the family returns to Winter Hill for Charles’s funeral, Astrid will be kidnapped into the afterlife until her mom utters the dreaded words “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”
Laura's Review: B-
This long-in-coming sequel (written by 'Wednesday's' Alfred Gough & Miles Millar) is probably the first film to since 2012’s “Frankenweenie” to recall the cartoony goth sensibilities of director Tim Burton. Nostalgia alone is sure to make this one a hit and the miraculous Michael Keaton dons the dermis of the decomposing demon as if he wore it just yesterday, but while the core of the film works well enough, there is no getting away from the fact that it’s padded with a lot of completely unnecessary subplots and characters.
Take Burton’s penchant for giving his current girlfriend a role in his films. This time, it’s Monica Bellucci as Delores, the high priestess of a soul sucking death cult who wants her ex-husband, Betelgeuse, back. Except as an excuse for Burton to make a nifty little b&w Mario Bava homage, the character goes nowhere. The same can be said for Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe), the former, now dead, star of cop series ‘Frank Hardballer’ who runs down criminals in the afterlife. The film would have been better if both had been jettisoned. And if the shrunken head guy from the original film was memorable, having six of them here only weakens the gag. Speaking of callbacks, I’m still trying to figure out why ‘Day-O’ was reprised as Charles’s funeral music.
Better is Astrid’s encounter with Jeremy (Arthur Conti, TV's 'House of the Dragons'), the guy who rescues her after she crashes her bike into the base of his treehouse. They connect over such things as ‘Crime and Punishment,’ and he invites her to spend Halloween – the day Rory proposed for his and her mother’s wedding – at his house and he’s delighted when she shows up dressed as Madam Curie – post radiation exposure. That Handbook for the Recently Deceased he says he bought at a yard sale will come in awfully handy.
Also clever is the way Burton and company handle the case of the original film’s Jeffrey Jones, now a registered child sex offender. Rather than have the actor appear in the film, Burton employs his plasticine puppetry to depict Charles in a plane crash, which he survives only to have his head bitten off by a shark, his headless torso spurting blood in the afterlife, something Delia overlooks. (It’s also a big plus that Burton sticks to his goofy playhouse practical effects.)
O’Hara resurrects Delia with all her arty pretensions, her relationship with her stepdaughter having softened with age, but Ryder’s Lydia is all wide-eyed anxiety, the character not really coming to life until the film’s last act. It doesn’t help that she’s saddled with Theroux in a relationship that makes no sense. The one that does is with Betelgeuse, still pining after all these years and coming very close to wedding her in an inspired climax officiated by Burn Gorman’s Father Damien (natch) and set to that overwrought classic, ‘Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain.’ And it wouldn’t be “Beetlejuice” without Danny Elfman’s carnivalesque, oompah-oompah score.
“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is the very definition of a hit and miss affair, but Keaton brings the fun. Just let’s not say his name three times – twice is enough.
Warner Brothers releases "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" in theaters on 9/6/24.
