Hollywood has a history of reanimating the decaying corpses of long-dead movies with belated sequels, so perhaps it was just a matter of time before somebody delved into the grave marked Beetlejuice. That someone was only ever going to be Tim Burton, director of the original 1988 film, and although discussions about a Beetlejuice sequel were reportedly under way for decades, Burton maintained that he would only consider it if Michael Keaton reprised the title role and any sequel remained faithful to the spirit of the morbidly eccentric original film. On both these counts, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice succeeds. As the prankster demon “bio-exorcist,” a suitably manic Keaton scuttles through the film like a giant cockroach in a striped suit, while the decaying DNA of the original picture is evident in every hyperstylized frame of the sequel.
Perhaps a little too much at times. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice teeters on the edge of the same pitfalls that scuppered the most recent Ghostbusters sequel: the sense that decades-old ideas have been dusted off, dressed up a little and passed off as new. Fortunately, what redeems Burton’s new film, at least to a certain extent, is the fact that those ideas were so wigged out and distinctive in the first place. Yes, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is derivative, but it’s also pleasingly idiosyncratic and rough around the edges. The director gets past the problem of a non-returning original cast member not with an AI reconstruction, but with a delightfully shonky, lo-fi claymation animated sequence that ends with the character’s face getting chewed off by a shark. Problem solved, Burton style.
This sequel is set more or less in the present day — although time in Burton’s world is elastic — with the now adult Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) rocking exactly the same haunted Victorian doll wardrobe and Bauhaus-groupie haircut as her teenage self in the first film. Lydia has achieved a degree of celebrity as a TV personality: she’s a “psychic mediator” and the host of a real-life hauntings show titled Ghost House. But she’s a shadow of her spiky former self. She’s brittle and vulnerable, browbeaten by a boyfriend (a horribly convincing Justin Theroux) who hides his narcissism behind a curtain of woo-woo, carey-sharey new age therapy speak.
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“Where’s that obnoxious goth girl who tortured me?” inquires Lydia’s stepmum, Delia (Catherine O’Hara), whose dilettante flirtations with the art world have finally borne fruit: we meet her as her Manhattan solo performance art show tips into catastrophe. Where indeed? It seems as though Lydia has undergone a wholesale personality transplant, passing the mantle of prickly adolescent with a penchant for black eyeliner to her rebellious daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega).
A family tragedy brings everyone back to the house where it all started, offering an opportunity for the persistent Beetlejuice to inveigle his way out of the underworld and finally claim Lydia as his reluctant spouse. There’s a spurious subplot involving Monica Bellucci as Beetlejuice’s spurned (and dissected) ex-wife, who has pulled herself back together (literally) and has set her sights on reclaiming her man. And a fun new addition to the cast is Willem Dafoe, playing a deceased actor who in turn is playing a hard-boiled cop tasked with investigating rule violations in the world of the dead; the gleeful silliness of scenes such as these are where the film feels most alive.
The second feature film of Burton’s career (the first was Pee-wee’s Big Adventure in 1985), Beetlejuice was a pivotal picture for the director. It was a calling card; the moment at which he was fully able to indulge his macabre, goth-boy, grand guignol vision. And it cemented collaborative relationships, in front of and behind the camera, that would endure for decades to come. Perhaps most notable of these is Danny Elfman, who composed the score for Beetlejuice (as well as Pee-wee), and went on to work on numerous subsequent Burton pictures, including this latest. The composer’s contribution to the score of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is archetypically Elfmanesque, sounding as though it’s played by an orchestra of frenzied skeletons.
Photo: AP
Other music choices are a little more hit and miss: the use of the Bee Gees’ Tragedy to accompany a key scene feels distractingly kitsch. But a deranged version of MacArthur Park, performed by demonically possessed cast members, is an inspired extended set piece that feels true to the anarchic mischief of the original, even if it fails to match the glorious absurdity of the Day-O (the Banana Boat Song) haunted dinner party sequence in Beetlejuice. And this sums up the approach of the whole picture: realistically, it was never going to match the instant cult appeal of the original, but it has a lot of fun trying.
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