A sequel to BEETLEJUICE was first announced when part 1 was still in theaters. Director Tim Burton started developing it in earnest, went through a couple different ideas, it seemed like it was really gonna happen in the early ‘90s until he and Michael Keaton shifted their focus to BATMAN RETURNS. In my opinion that’s one of Burton’s best movies and one of the great sequels – it’s a continuation but reinvents so much of the first movie’s approach that it feels completely fresh and even more potent.
A bit of the song “Macarthur Park” echoes hauntingly over the production logos of the BEETLEJUICE sequel we finally got 36 (!) years later: “I don’t think that I can take it / ‘cause it took so long to bake it.” But after all that time in the oven, BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE is no BATMAN RETURNS. It’s more of a getting-the-gang-back-together type of sequel, not as much of a shift as it probly would’ve been back then, or that it would need to be to be a new classic. To me it feels less aggressive about nostalgia than most of these types of things, but I gotta admit it’s built more on “remember this?” than “hey, check THIS out!” It returns to the afterlife but mostly just the same bureaucracy/waiting room stuff as the first movie. We get another sandworm, another non-consensual lip synch, another wedding. All fun stuff, but wouldn’t all-new stuff be better? I bet younger, hungrier Burton would’ve brought us somewhere totally different.
And yet I got a pretty big kick out of this. Burton hadn’t made a movie in five years, and it’s been longer than that since he made one that anyone loved. He does seem more engaged here than he’s been in quite some time, and as you may have heard he’s back in hands-on mode. I don’t mind that he uses so much computer animation these days (he’s an animator, after all), but it’s a total delight to see him ditching that in favor of the ol’ puppets, costumes and stop motion. That was a great choice, but almost more crucially he’s back to doing silly-ass comedy. This is a descendent not only of BEETLEJUICE, but of PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE, CABIN BOY and MARS ATTACKS!. No, it’s not as good as any of those, but how many movies are?
It would be kinda hilarious if it pulled a GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE and pretended we all take the first film very seriously, but I think Burton would be too embarrassed for that. Instead it’s kind of a goof on legacy sequels and on his own career. Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder, HOMEFRONT) has grown up to be a sellout and a parody of herself – wearing the same goth outfit, but now as the Vampira-like host of a reality ghost show on a set based on her childhood attic. Whether or not she still qualifies as “strange and unusual,” she sees ghosts everywhere, and she’s sick of it. Her producer/boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux, BODY COUNT) is an exploitative, pony-tailed jackass who misappropriates therapy language to manipulate her. He’s kind of like the Otho character, but he’s also like Beetlejuice, trying to trick her into marrying him for his own advantage, publicly proposing at her dad’s funeral!
Yeah, we all figured they weren’t gonna bring back Jeffrey Jones (who was later arrested on child pornography charges) as Charles. Also they weren’t gonna bring back the main characters, the Maitlands, at the very least because they’re ghosts and Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis couldn’t look the same age as they did in 1988. In the case of the Maitlands the movie does what you expect – mentions once that they were able to leave because of a loophole and never mentions them again. (Lydia’s daughter saying “How convenient” to that explanation is a rare case of the “pointing it out makes it okay” type of meta joke working for me.) But the movie’s most outrageous running gag is that they do keep coming back to Charles and reminding you that the actor’s not in the movie. First there’s a whole stop motion sequence depicting his death by shark. Then he’s a character in the afterlife, but without a head, because it was eaten by the shark. The audacity of needlessly drawing attention to it never failed to crack me up.
The funeral brings Lydia together with her pretentious artist stepmother Delia (Catherina O’Hara, ROCK & RULE) and sullen boarding school daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega, THE BABYSITTER: KILLER QUEEN), who resents Lydia for breaking up with her father (Santiago Cabrera, TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT), now deceased. Especially after playing Wednesday Addams (in a show partly directed by Burton) they could hardly have Ortega be another goth, so she rebels partly by believing in science, not the supernatural. She’s sort of the co-protagonist, and there’s a point where I felt like it was getting surprisingly serious about teen romance material, but it has plenty of tricks up its sleeve.
Meanwhile, in the afterlife, everybody is pathetically preoccupied with the past. Beetlejuice (Keaton, THE PROTEGE) has a photo of teenage Lydia on his desk at work and still schemes to marry her. His ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci, SHOOT ‘EM UP) – who poisoned him to become immortal so he chopped her up with an ax – reconstitutes after centuries of being stored in boxes, and sets her eyes on revenge (plus sucking the souls out of various ghosts and leaving them deflated like balloons). Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe, THE LIGHTHOUSE) is a ghost detective trying to catch her, but as a b-movie star who died doing his own stunts he’s basically acting, reading speeches off of cue cards and throwing in gratuitous somersaults.
I’ve listened to several podcasts about this sequel and the various unmade ones. Most people seem to feel similar to me, that it’s a flawed movie they mostly enjoyed. But I think I differ in my interpretation of what BEETLEJUICE is and should be. I love and identify with Lydia as much as anybody but I feel like some people are too precious about what can be done with the character. Especially when they scoff at the various unused concepts (where Lydia falls in love with a surfer or works as a flight attendant or…) it seems like they want her to be an unchanging aspirational figure of unimpeachable judgment. But she’s always been a goof, that’s why we relate to her! A top five moment in the first film is when she crosses out “fallen” in her suicide note and changes it to “plummeted.” We’re laughing at her as well as with her; these are irreverent comedies, not wish fulfillment. So I really liked that in this one she’s a total mess. Good people can be total messes. You try losing your mother at a young age, then growing up around art scene hipsters in a haunted house where a demon tried to marry you. (By the way, I like that when Lydia reveals her past with a “trickster demon” to Rory it sounds exactly like how it would be said in a serious horror movie.)
One thing I wasn’t really expecting is how much they did with Delia. She seems to have become an even more successful artist, with a whole foundation in her name, currently collaborating with a French graffiti artist played by Sami Slimane, the main guy from ATHENA. Ever since EDWARD SCISSORHANDS I’ve thought of Burton’s movies as being about sensitive, misfit artists, but of course BEETLEJUICE made Delia’s “living and breathing art” one of its funniest satirical targets. Now, as Lydia struggles to connect with her own daughter she has reason to get along better with Delia, and the movie also seems more charmed by her antics than the first time around, because at least she’s true to herself, which Lydia hasn’t managed lately. And yet… (SPOILER)… the movie hasn’t gone soft on us. Making us like Delia more doesn’t mean she won’t bite it as a gag. It’s so refreshing these days to see a sequel that doesn’t seem to give a fuck about making another one.
(Although if they did, we all know what it would have to be called.)
(BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE 2)
The main criticism I’ve seen is that it’s too convoluted and overstuffed. Pretty much every person I’ve talked to and every review I’ve heard specifically brings up Delores as an unnecessary character only there because Bellucci is Burton’s girlfriend. I’m not saying the story couldn’t be improved with some streamlining, but I object to the notion that everything here should have a strong narrative purpose. In fact, I think more movies should have unnecessary characters played by Tim Burton’s girlfriends.
Delores is no Martian Spy Girl, but I had fun watching her staple herself together and deflate a bunch of people in her, what, 5 or so minutes of screen time? And without her crimes we don’t need Dafoe playing a hard boiled detective with half his face looking like a science class anatomy dummy. To me these gratuitous new characters are of higher value than the admittedly fun repeats like the sandworm and the guys with the shrunken heads. I’ve seen those before.
Delores and Wolf may be somewhat extraneous to the main story of Astrid being trapped in the afterlife and Lydia needing the help of Beetlejuice to rescue her, but they’re in keeping with the PEE-WEE/CABIN BOY/MARS ATTACKS! attitude of fucking around and doing silly shit. To me most of the biggest joys in the movie are the things that don’t necessarily make sense, like Beetlejuice’s flashback being shot like a Mario Bava film and dubbed into Italian, or his eye circles dripping like mascara when he cries, or when he has healthier hair to woo Lydia with Richard Marx, or that the Baby Beetlejuice character looks more like a Spirit Halloween lawn decoration than a movie monster. (And is used for a TRAINSPOTTING reference?) One of my favorite jokes is that the emotional reunion between Astrid and her dead father is all played completely straight other than the silly animatronic piranhas attached to his flesh, wiggling and making little sucking noises the whole time.
Ortega is very strong in a part that’s too straightforward to be as memorable as Lydia or Wednesday. She gets to do a little bit of crazy dancing, like in maybe the best episode of Wednesday, but she’s mostly here to keep the story ever so slightly grounded. The main event, obviously, is seeing Keaton back in the moldy makeup, grunting and grimacing, morphing into different personas, making a Large Marge face. It’s such a weird, hard to explain character, only in the first movie for 17 minutes, not much more here, iconic but not yet worn out. To me it really did seem like a big deal when they summoned him. There’s still weight to it. And he’s still funny.
The script is credited to Wednesday creators (also writers of LETHAL WEAPON 4 and THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR) Alfred Gough & Miles Millar, story by those two and Seth Grahame-Smith (DARK SHADOWS, ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER, PRIDE + PREJUDICE + ZOMBIES), because he wrote a version of it almost a decade ago. The one that was in development forever long after the other ones that were in development forever.
After that long history of almost-weres I can’t help but think about what might have been. Way back in the beginning Jonathan Gems (pre-MARS ATTACKS!) wrote the version they came very close to making called BEETLEJUICE GOES HAWAIIAN. He later told Fangoria, “Tim thought it would be funny to match the surfing backdrop of a beach movie with some sort of German Expressionism, because they’re totally wrong together.” The Deetzes would’ve moved to Hawaii to open a resort on an ancient burial ground, there would’ve been surfing contests, a volcano, Beetlejuice and Lydia mermaids, a gang of beatnik bullies, Frankie and Annette style musical numbers. It would’ve allowed Burton to go into a visual mode that was completely new instead of partly new and it just sounds hilarious. But he was feeling BATMAN RETURNS more, so it worked out. We can’t have everything.
I’m not ready to say that the old Tim Burton is back from the dead, or that a new one has risen. But his eyes have opened. I think I might see a few sparks coming from his neck bolts. I’ll stay tuned.
September 26th, 2024 at 10:35 am
This might surprise some of you, because I rarely talk about it, but the first BEETLEJUICE was the most important movie of my childhood. I was obsessed with the cartoon and when I learned that there was a live action movie, I got my mother to buy the tape (on the cover they spelled Michael Keaton’s name “Keaten”, btw) and watched it so many times, I can still cite almost the whole movie in its German dub from memory. (I kinda broke my heart when I watched it for the first time in English and realized how badly dubbed it was and that my sister’s and mine favourite and most quoted line doesn’t actually exist!)
So of course I lowered my expectations, especially after the ALIEN: ROM-EMBERTHAT debacle from a few weeks earlier.
And I had a blast! I was not prepared for how wild the movie goes.
My complaints are really minimal and most of them have to do with the ending, which both suffers from “Hey, remember the thing you liked in the last movie? Here it is again, but not as good” and “We have no idea how to wrap up the subplots, so let’s pick the most random way” syndromes. I’m willing to forgive the last one, because let’s be honest, part 1 wasn’t exactly BACK TO THE FUTURE when it comes to the script. It was full of holes and randomness and that’s why it worked. Of course one could say: “We shouldn’t check our brain at the door, they had a good opportunity to put more effort into the writing”, but honestly, for something like BEETLEJUICE it’s okay. (Although I wonder if it was necessary to kill Rory at the end. He was an annoying gold digger, but didn’t even try to kill Lydia. Even in a movie that portrays death as nothing to be afraid of, this seemed unnecessary harsh for someone who was just an asshole.)
Of course the 2nd biggest complaint is that for a movie, that tries to have a certain actor NOT in it, you see his face pretty often. I mean, they give that guy a cool claymation goodbye, but explain the Maitlands’, who were the actual protagonists of part 1, away with one line of dialogue?
One could also say that it doesn’t fully escape the unfortunate trends of giving our childhood heroes sad lifes, but Lydia doesn’t have it THAT bad. She has panic attacks and a douchy fiance, but is a celebrity and even if her daughter seems to hate her, as Delia points out, it’s more or less normal teenie behaviour.
But all in all I was really on board with the whole thing. Even giving Beetlejuice a backstory worked, although it was completely unnecessary. He was one of those characters who didn’t need a backstory and we are safe to assume that the info he gave us were straight up lies. Still, both the story and they way it was told worked.
BTW, was I the only one who expected a surprise villain reveal? The Deetzes were so surrounded by death, I fully expected the wedding to be interrupted by someone who revealed that he manipulated the plane, opened the manhole for the grafitti artist, send the wrong snakes, maybe even drove the car that caused Astrid to ride her bike into that one dude’s backyard.
Random side note: My sister pointed out that the middle part, where Lydia seeks help from Beetlejuice and they go on a sidequest together, actually feels like the cartoon, where the two were best friends.
I fully approve of BEETLE2CE. It’s incredible that in a time, where everything has to be safe and a franchise a big budget (IMO at times pretty PG-13 pushing) weirdo fantasy movie