Director – Tim Burton – 2024 – US – Cert. 12a – 104m
***1/2
The hyperactive ghost from the afterlife returns, along with a number of characters from the original – sequel to the 1988 film is out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, September 6th
When the original Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 1988) came out, no-one had quite worked out what Tim Burton was about, and the film was arresting, shocking, completely out there, utterly bonkers and like nothing anyone had ever seen. It’s difficult to know exactly what one could do to achieve that same effect in a sequel, or whether one should even try that approach. In the interim, Burton has had a lengthy and successful Hollywood career, arguably the system’s resident maverick director. When he’s good he’s very good; when he’s not, you wait for the next one and it’s usually an improvement.
In the event, perhaps inevitably, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice doesn’t have the same shock of the new as its predecessor, but it’s similarly out there and bonkers and recognisably a sequel. It takes a while to get going – the first hour lumbers along with flashes of brilliance, such as a memorable, 3D-animated passenger aircraft crash at sea sequence, but the final third or so (from the point where one of the characters is lured in to the afterlife by another who turns out to be a ghost) is much more effective.
Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) from the original is now considerably older, and has carved out for herself a career as a paranormal investigator / talk show host. (You may recall she seemed to drift from distinctive Gothic teen to conformist high school student at the end of the first film, so this seems to have conveniently forgotten that ending to build on the Gothic instead, arguably a smart move since that side of the character was always more interesting.)
She has a manager Rory (Justin Theroux from American Psycho, Mary Harron, 2000; Mulholland Dr., David Lynch, 1999) who she plans to marry and who seems almost too good to be true, plus a teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega from Wednesday, TV series, writer Alfred Gough who co-wrote the current film, 2023; Scream VI, 2023, Scream, 2022, the latter both Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett) from a previous husband who passed. Lydia’s stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara, also from the first film) is now a performance artist.
In the opening minutes, Lydia is presenting an episode of her show to a live audience when Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) appears intermittently, flickering and flashing in the audience like a faulty fluorescent light. There follows much hokum about a model house, inside which he is trapped until (as you may remember) someone should utter his name three times. He plays quite a significant role in later parts of the film, in particular trying to negotiate Lydia’s marrying of him rather than her intended Rory.
Meanwhile, Delores (Monica Belluci from Irreversible, Gaspar Noé, 2000; Dobermann, Jan Kounen, 1997), reassembles herself from various, separate body parts, staple-gunning or clicking them back together in a bravura effects sequence, before proceeding to suck the life breath from the mouth of anyone unlucky enough to cross her path, the first of which is a janitor (Danny DeVito). The sucking leaves the victims’ bodies like a pile of one-piece, discarded clothing. This is all very impressive, but like a number of the major characters, she is never really developed, just present as part of the overall mayhem.
Another such character is Delores’ nemesis, gun-toting afterlife underworld cop Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe, who looks to be having as much fun as he did in his minor role as the Hateful Guard in Cry-Baby, John Waters, 1990). With one side of his face visibly rotting, he demonstrates his concern for his appearance by periodically smoothing his hair. He spends much of the proceedings navigating passages in the underworld with a cadre of ghoulish cops searching for Delores.
Teenage Astrid, like her mother, plays a major role, getting involved in a romance with local, small town boy Jeremy (Arthur Conti) who like her mother’s love interest turns out far too good to be true and not what she (or we) expected. Towards the end, redeploying Pino Donaggio’s syrupy main them from shocker Carrie (Brian DePalma, 1976), she gets to have a scene where she gives birth to a monster baby Beetlejuice. It’s tacky, yet somehow in keeping with everything else that’s going on here, and demonstrates a director completely in synch with his core, left-of-centre, horror genre audience.
As with the original, a lot of the highlights are to be found in the incidental details: members of the recently dead who walk around with their heads or lower bodies bitten off by carnivores, the off-kilter corridors of the afterlife’s underworld, the inexplicable door into a desert populated with surreal sandworms reprised from the first film.
Or better yet, the Soul Train to the Great Beyond, for which Burton pulls out all the stops to deliver a platform festooned with singers, dancers and punters from the black soul music scene. Which is weird because, whatever the considerable merits of Burton as a filmmaker, he only rarely casts black people. And in this film, apart from this one location packed with them, I can’t recall a single black person. And yet, this one scene is a real winner.
Overall, then, something of a hodgepodge, taking a scattershot approach, but with enough going for it to resonate with fans of the original. As with that original, Burton has made (or would go on to make) much better movies, as well as much worse. This one is middling; however, if, like this writer, you’re a Burton completist, you’ll still want to see it.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is out in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on Friday, September 6th.
Teaser Trailer:
Trailer 1:
Trailer 2: