(Bloomberg) -- Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the long-delayed sequel to Tim Burton’s 1988 demonic farce, starts in the dark, with Donna Summer wailing a bit of MacArthur’s Park: “I don’t think that I can take it. ’Cause it took so long to bake it. And I’ll never have that recipe again.” Rest assured, even after 36 years, the director hasn’t lost his recipe. The sweet, green icing of Beetlejuice is flowing down.
“Living people ignore the strange and unusual,” we were told back in ’88. But audiences delighted in this cinematic oddity, and it was an instant cult classic. The film’s success may say more about America’s exhaustion with the hollow righteousness of the Reagan years than it does about Burton’s filmmaking. Because as great as it is, Beetlejuice just shouldn’t work.
Consider the plot: A dead young couple hires a perverted demon to help them scare off the living family that’s moved into their Connecticut home, but they change their mind and decide to adopt the suicide-obsessed teenage daughter instead. Did I mention it’s a family film?
Once again, Burton hits some seriously bizarre territory on both sides of the grave. He and his writing team (Alfred Gough, Miles Millar and Seth Grahame-Smith) follow the same zany logic that worked well the first time—no logic at all. And that ought to resonate just fine with today’s filmgoers, who are likewise exhausted by the rectitude of our time. The titular demon, spitting out his demented, warp-speed stand-up, whizzes right around questions of right and wrong. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice may not be intellectually nourishing, and it’s not all politically correct, but it’s a blast.
As a sequel, the movie isn’t breaking new ground. It’s almost a straight remake, serving up more of the same gross-out irreverence and half-baked nostalgia that landed so well in the ’80s. Maybe that’s the ultimate trick to pulling off a second chapter: Do the same thing, but wait about four decades first.
The long passage of time allows us to revisit the characters and material from a very different angle. Lydia Deetz, the suicidal Goth teen (Winona Ryder), is now a pill-popping reality-TV star with a moody teen of her own. Lydia’s self-involved sculptor stepmom, Delia (Catherine O’Hara), is here, too; the art world has caught up to her narcissism, and she’s finally a success, doing icky performance pieces. As for the Maitlands (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis), we were told in Beetlejuice that they had to haunt their house in Winter River, Connecticut, for 150 years, but they’re long gone. As Lydia explains, “We found a loophole, and they moved on.” Screenwriters everywhere, take note: There’s always a loophole.
Lydia’s father has also moved on, though we do see him in a Claymation subplot. (Rejoice! The delightfully janky Claymation special effects live on.) These particular dramaturgical whims—disposing of three of the first film’s six main characters—may not have been so arbitrary: Jeffrey Jones, who played Charles Deetz in the original, was arrested on child pornography charges in 2002; Baldwin’s more recent legal troubles, arising from an accidental shooting death on the set of Rust, likewise made him unsuitable for a family picture about dead people.
Beetlejuice himself, riotously embodied (and disembodied) by Michael Keaton, is obviously back. Alone among the characters, he hasn’t changed a lick. He’s been having the same “mid-afterlife crisis” all this time. And as the hardest-working supporting character in cinema, he supplies wormholes in the disjointed screenplay and fills up every second of his screen time with the lewd, gory gags and wisecracks that are the essence of the films.
Also along for the ride are Lydia’s deeply serious daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), and boyfriend, Ronny (Justin Theroux), a touchy-feely dweeb with a flaccid man bun. And there’s Jeremy (Arthur Conti), a Dostoevsky-quoting emo heartthrob Astrid falls for; Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe), a ghost detective struggling to keep the peace in the afterworld; and Dolores (Monica Bellucci), Beetlejuice’s ex-wife, a sexy Frankenstein type who’s bearing a grudge. That’s right, we get some of Beetlejuice’s backstory here, and it’s a tender tale of romance, murder and the Black Death.
There is a plot in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, but it’s far too complicated to summarize, and besides, this is Beetlejuice—who cares? If the movie has a point, sort of, it’s that family life is a roller-coaster ride. The Deetzes, navigating their bonkers supernatural obstacle course, play out all their loss, conflicts and resentments, but they also find they share a common purpose and, yes, love.
If the sequel suffers in comparison to the original, it might be that these emotional threads are too visible. Delia, totally oblivious to her stepdaughter in 1988, almost approaches motherly in 2024. O’Hara is an international treasure who’d be exquisite reading the phonebook, but her performance here is a bit too earnest. She just can’t turn off the vapid-but-big-hearted Moira Rose energy she perfected in Schitt’s Creek.
Lydia, so self-assured as a teen, is lost now; and Ryder, fittingly, seems traumatized and bewildered in much of the film. Maybe she’s purposely goofing on her lost-in-space viral moment from the 2017 Screen Actors Guild Awards. It wouldn’t be the movie’s only inside joke: There’s also a great dig at Burton’s nemesis, Disney, and a really, really dark joke—considering Baldwin’s legal troubles—about a live grenade on a film set. In Beetlejuice, things can be important plot points, site gags and jump scares all at once. Burton’s ghoulish, garish universe counts on mistaken meanings and awkward juxtapositions. The movie’s title, after all, is a mispronunciation (of Betelgeuse).
The director has no qualms about outright theft, either: Beetlejuice is where he found his slap-dash visual aesthetic, borrowing liberally from Edward Gorey and Terry Gilliam. (The afterworld in Beetlejuice could have been lifted from Brazil.) Sometimes his thievery is sarcastic—the afterlife sandworm, with jaws inside its jaws, sends up the Dune and Alien movies in brilliantly bad Claymation—but mostly Burton robs what he clearly loves. He was always delightfully derivative and way ahead of the curve. He recognized that modern audiences love appropriations. Indeed, we cannot organize our ever-more-complicated world without them.
For its off-the-rails denouement, the sequel returns to MacArthur’s Park, but not Summer’s version. Instead, it’s the cheesy recording Richard Harris made in the late ’60s. It’s a deep, deep cut, marvelous because it’s so wincingly bad.
Burton has had his earlier, much-beloved film to pilfer from here and remixes the right parts. A nostalgia trip back to a nostalgia trip maybe seem to promise a journey with diminishing returns, but I imagine hoards of people will be happy to take it—and take it again, to make sure they catch every delirious joke.
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