Thirty-six years is a long time to wait for a sequel, but Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice feels like it was made immediately after the first film wrapped. The same characters reappear, while sets and props seem to have been carefully preserved against the day they were required for a second installment. Even Michael Keaton in the title role looks identical to his 1988 self. He’s now 73 years old but under all that make-up, who can tell?
I’d recommend rewatching the original Beetlejuice, if only to marvel at the youthful demeanours of Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, who played the Maitlands, the deceased couple whose home was taken over by the vulgar, trendy Deetz family. The Maitlands are the only significant absence in the new film, apart from the late Glenn Shadix, who played Otho, the loathsome interior designer.
Jeffrey Jones, who played Charles Deetz, has appeared in only one tele-movie over the past decade, possibly because he is now a registered sex offender. Jones obviously wasn’t going to be welcomed back into the Beetlejuice firmament. Instead, at the very beginning of the film we learn that Charles has gone down in a plane crash and been monstered by a shark. This allows him to appear in the Afterlife as a walking torso with head and upper body chomped off. Aside from Jones, Burton has got the band back together, and added rising star, Jenna Ortega.
Wynona Ryder, who played the teenage Lydia Deetz in the first film, said she would only participate if Burton and Keaton returned. She got her wish, and so did the fans. When we meet the former Goth girl again, Lydia has cashed in on her psychic abilities by hosting a popular TV show in which she visits haunted houses. Her producer, Rory (Justin Theroux), a sensitive new age guy, also happens to be her fiancé. Lydia’s daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), came with her first husband, Richard (Santiago Cabrera), who disappeared in the Amazon.
Astrid’s unhappy relationship with her mother has echoes of Lydia’s early friction with her stepmother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara). In this movie, Delia’s career as an avant-garde sculptor and conceptual artist has flourished, although her work is as ridiculous as ever. Upon learning of Charles’s death, she instantly plans to turn the family’s grief into a mega art project.
Although the middle-aged Lydia has reconciled with Delia, Astrid believes her ghost-whispering, celebrity mum is a phoney. She’ll have to confront this belief when they return to the family home in Winter River, Connecticut, where the scale model of the town is still in the attic, along with other mementos of the earlier film.
Cut to Beetlejuice, the fast-talking sleazebag demon, now in charge of an office in the Afterlife, where he lords it over a team of shrunken-headed underlings. As brazen as ever, he has a new problem in the form of Delores (Monica Bellucci) – his first wife from his days as a corpse robber in medieval Italy. He recalls how their lusty nuptials were brought to a halt when he found his new bride was a homocidal “soul-sucker”. Centuries later, Delores has revived, stapled herself together and set out on a path of destruction in the mean streets of the Afterlife, searching for her former husband.
The job of bringing her in, belongs to Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe), a former TV cop, who is still playing the role in the next world. This is bizarre, entertaining stuff, but it’s never successfully integrated into the main storyline. For the sake of simplicity and continuity, it would have been sufficient to focus on Beetlejuice’s return to the land of the living, still fired by a fierce desire to marry Lydia.
I won’t reveal any more about the story. The great selling points of the film are Michael Keaton’s barnstorming performance as Beetlejuice, Burton’s comedic vision of the Afterlife as a nightmarish bureaucracy, and the hand-made nature of the special effects. The latter looked deliberately amateurish even in 1988, when the camera panned over an obvious model of the town. After three decades of increasingly elaborate CGI, Burton’s decision to rely on the kind of models designed by Ray Harryhausen for classic films such as Jason and the Argonauts (1963), shows why he will never be part of the Marvel Comics Universe.
The big budget superhero films that dominate the box office today, spend astronomical sums on armies of digital artists to create the big cinematic moments. Burton, however, is an unashamed nostalgic for the B-movies and TV series he watched as a kid. His aggressive sandworms look like they’ve been stitched together at a local fete, the decayed and mutilated figures that populate the Afterlife are pure plastic. The director’s worst ever film is surely Alice in Wonderland (2010), which suffered not only from a garbled storyline, but too great a reliance on digital special effects. His previous film, Dumbo (2019) went down the same plughole.
The great Burton movies are packed with unnaturally bright, artificial images of suburbia, with characters no less sharply defined. These films come with a large helping of satire or parody, but they are made with such affection the humour never becomes tiresome. The first thing to realise about Beetlejuice (1988) is that it was a comic mirror image of The Exorcist (1973). In place of the priest trying to expell a demon, Beetlejuice advertises his services as a ”bio-exorcist”, willing to get rid of unwanted humans who are being a nuisance to ghosts.
By portraying the Afterlife as a maze of shabby offices, a tawdry waiting room, and a crowded railway station where the newly dead hop aboard the “soul train”, Burton conjures thoughts of familiar, ‘hellish’ experiences from everyday life. Despite the endless procession of dismembered bodies, ghosts and ghouls, there’s not a lot of horror in these horror-comedies.
Somehow, Burton manages not to include a scene in which Beetlejuice says: “It’s showtime!” Apart from that, there’s nothing here to disappoint fans, who are already showing all the symptoms of cult-like adoration. Judging from the preview, if you happen to own a jacket or pair of pants with black-and-white stripes this may be the perfect occasion to break them out of the wardrobe.
Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, Seth Grahame-Smith
Starring: Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Jenna Ortega, Justin Theroux, Willem Dafoe, Santiago Cabrera, Arthur Conti, Monica Bellucci, Danny DeVito, Burn Gorman
USA, M, 105 mins
Published in the Australian Financial Review, 7 September, 2024