Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice

4 outta 5

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, a sequel that took over three decades to manifest, turns out to be an entertainingly unique film. It doesn’t exactly retread many moments from the original, but it does throw in a few things that one would expect from a Beetlejuice movie. It has a few neat twists to the mythology, and the returning vets are great, easily sliding back into their roles. As with the original, there is a lot of stuff not involving the titular “Ghost with the Most” but when he shows up, he gleefully takes over with manic, gross out energy. 

Decades ago, as a teenager Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) was the subject of a haunting by the vile ghoul Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton. Fun fact: the title may say and be pronounced as “Beetlejuice”, but he’s spelled as Betelgeuse). Now she is a prominent TV show Ghost Hunter, which annoys her daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega). Lydia isn’t doing that great because she is suddenly being haunted by visions of Betelgeuse and her father has died, much to the dismay of Lydia’s stepmother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara). Lydia, Astrid and Delia go back to Lydia’s childhood home for the funeral along with Lydia’s producer and boyfriend, Rory (Justin Theroux). Unexpectedly, Astrid strikes up a friendship with a local boy, Jeremy (Arthur Conti) and Rory proposes to Lydia at the funeral. Now Betelgeuse wants to break out into the real world, wreak havoc, and to again try to marry Lydia, all while his ghoulish ex-wife, Delores (Monica Bellucci) is seeking revenge.

There is a little bit of “bad guy from the previous movie turns good” here, which has often ruined a few sequels as the villain gets so popular they become a hero. While there are a few moments where Betelgeuse does something beneficial for the Deetz family, he saves Astrid from being banished to the afterlife or when he exposes Rory’s nefarious ulterior motives, but it is less about him suddenly being nice than him just being an agent of afterlife chaos. Keaton returns to the role not missing a beat. There’s always something interesting how Keaton does as Betelgeuse. The tempo of his voice goes all over the place, sometimes Betelgeuse sounds like Keaton and then he’ll just turn into a guttural croak. He seems like an old showbiz guy who is an undead spook. There is a peek into his life before he died, and it turns out he was a grave robber during the great plague, so he was always nasty.

Betelgeuse’s ex-wife is a sort of Bride of Frankenstein style character for Bellucci to play, as she looks like a classic monster. Betelgeuse having a ghoulish ex-wife does sort of explain why he wanted to marry Lydia in the first film, in the 1988 movie he even pulls out a severed finger with a ring attached and says, “She meant nothing to me, I swear!” It gives the movie an even bigger bad than Betelgeuse to worry about. There is a plotline with Astrid and her new friend that goes in unexpected directions and offers a new look into the afterlife. Conti as Jeremy seems just hunky-dory at the start and then adds more layers. 

Betelgeuse is held back a lot in this film, mostly just appearing to make things more complicated. There is a lot of time spent with the Deetz. Ryder is also still great as Lydia who is less chill and more fidgety in her later years. She has some funny reactions, like when she is stressed by Betelgeuse reappearing and does some loud breathing exercises. Theroux as her boyfriend seems like he is looking out for Lydia but is just manipulating her. As Lydia’s daughter, Astrid is the opposite of her spooky mother, and Ortega gets laughs at being incredibly annoyed at everything. There is a subplot about them being separated because of tension over the death of Astrid’s father which gets an afterlife family reunion to resolve their family trauma. It  is emotional but also dopey because the dad in the afterlife is constantly being nibbled by piranhas. O’Hara’s Delia takes her grief about her husband dying and makes it into a narcissistic art project. The reveal of what happened to the husband is amusingly dark as he got eaten by a shark (in a hilarious stop motion scene) and it gets crazier as he appears in the afterlife missing the top half of his body (but he can still talk!).

Visually, it feels very much like the first film with elaborate sets and puppets and makeup. There’s spirits catching the Soul Train to the great beyond and it is like a 1970s Soul Train groovy dance TV show that is infectiously joyful. The designs of the afterlife characters are distinctive with complex makeup jobs as people enter the afterlife looking like the moment they died, like a corny actor character played by Willem Dafoe who is missing a chunk of his head. Even in a small role, Dafoe is a hoot as a dead action hero actor who is still mugging for the camera.

Sometimes decades later sequels can just turn into uninspired remakes, but Beetlejuice Beetlejuice embodies the undead spirit of the original without just copying it. And Keaton’s Ghost with the Most remains crudely fun to watch, even if he isn’t in it a bunch. But when he is, it rocks.