Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice” (1988) derived its title, by way of a phonetically useful misspelling, from the name of Betelgeuse, a centuries-old demon who delighted in pranking the living and the dead alike. Played by a marvellously repugnant Michael Keaton, with a barf-smeared face, a sex pest’s leer, a charlatan’s patter, and a voice of boozy gravel, Betelgeuse was a figure of malevolent play—a puckish parasite of the afterlife. Dare to summon him, by saying his name three times in quick succession, and you were in for a hell of a headache. But you were also in for some fabulously macabre spectacle, realized with special effects that, seen today, are all the more captivating for their old-fashioned, handcrafted inventiveness. At Burton and Betelgeuse’s command, inanimate objects sprang to vicious life, staircase bannisters coiling into lethal serpents, and a jauntily stylized blue-green underworld—full of shrunken heads, plucked eyeballs, and other grisly evidence of violent death—beckoned to us from beyond.
If Betelgeuse was the movie’s not-so-secret weapon, he was also something of a red herring. A little of the guy went a long way, and Burton knew that maximizing Keaton’s impact required limiting his exposure. “Beetlejuice” may have been a netherworld burlesque, but it was also a stirring tragicomedy about the conjoined fates of the living and the departed, firm in its belief that death, a realm of tediously long lines and uncertain ends, ultimately offered its sufferers no more relief or resolution than life. At its heart, and in its playfully jaundiced soul, “Beetlejuice” was also a movie about the burdens and blessings of family—and, specifically, about the comedy, horror, and surprising resilience of marriage.
You had to laugh at the goofily mismatched Charles and Delia Deetz (Jeffrey Jones and Catherine O’Hara)—a boring suburban aspirant and a neurotic, self-aggrandizing sculptress—as they abandoned their idle-rich New York existence for an old farmhouse in Connecticut. Rather more functional as a couple were the home’s previous occupants, the recently deceased Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis), who ill-advisedly hired Betelgeuse to scare the new occupants out of their digs. By the end, even Betelgeuse couldn’t escape the tug of matrimony; in exchange for supernatural services rendered, he tried—and failed—to tie the knot with Lydia Deetz, Charles’s teen-age daughter. She was played, in a star-making early role, by Winona Ryder, with a tremulous goth-girl resplendence that has never fully abandoned her.
Now, more than three decades later, Burton has brought Lydia, Delia, and Betelgeuse together again for a pleasurably flyweight sequel, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” Lydia has become a self-styled paranormal investigator with her own occult-themed talk show; she and her stepmother, Delia, always at each other’s throat in the first film, have long since buried the hatchet. But Lydia has found fresh estrangement: from her own teen-age daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), a science-minded skeptic who can’t abide her mom’s “supernatural bullsh*t.” As for the benevolent ghosts of Adam and Barbara, they have permanently moved on, and their disappearance is, by some distance, the most haunting thing in the movie. Lydia explains the Maitlands’ departure by way of “a loophole”—a technicality in the dreary bureaucracy of the afterlife.
Few sequels, especially those as belated as this one, come into being without arranging a few narrative loopholes of their own: expedient twists and contrivances that can explain a shift in dramatic focus or the conspicuous absence of key past collaborators. “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” makes use of one particularly gutsy one: mere minutes in, Charles Deetz meets with an untimely offscreen demise, and under circ*mstances grisly enough to rule out either an open casket or a return appearance by the actor who played him. (Jones has had few screen roles since 2003, when he pleaded no contest to charges of hiring a minor to pose for sexually explicit photographs.)
And so the story kicks off with a funeral, and surely the only funeral ever to feature a choral rendition of “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song),” in a warm callback to the first film’s cracked calypso showstopper. (Not least among the spirits hovering over the sequel is Harry Belafonte.) But Charles is scarcely in the ground before we hear a peal of wedding bells: Lydia’s boyfriend and manager, Rory (Justin Theroux), an insufferable font of New Age therapy-speak, actually pops the question at the wake, and, if you think that’s in bad taste, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is just getting warmed up. Before long, Betelgeuse (now spelled Beetlejuice in the credits, but whatever) has reared his green-haired head, and characters are hurtling through otherworldly portals, propelled, at every turn, by the hectoring spirits of love and commitment. Lydia must contend with duelling proposals from Rory and Betelgeuse; Delia weeps and wails for her lost hubby; even Astrid is bewitched, for a spell, by a youthful crush. No wonder it all builds to a hellish wedding, complete with goo-slathered cake, and with multiple brides and grooms in play.
Skulking alongside the main action, meanwhile, is Delores, Betelgeuse’s long-lost, long-dead spouse; in a better Hades, she would have been known as the Afterwife. Hellbent on reclaiming Betelgeuse as her husband, Delores gets one of the movie’s deftest bits of slapstick grotesquerie, a body-horror tour de force that could double as a staple-gun ad. She’s the latest of Burton’s corpse brides, and one so murderous that even infernal denizens steer clear of her. Naturally—or, rather, supernaturally—she is played by none other than Monica Bellucci, Burton’s offscreen partner.
Nearly every movie sequel is an act of creative reanimation, an attempt to bring a shock of artistic life back to that which has already come to a logical end. Even so, given Burton’s career-long interest in disturbing the dead, he has directed remarkably few sequels before this one; his “Batman Returns”(1992) was a welcome exception. Like most successful American filmmakers, Burton has sometimes caved to the imperatives of an industry that increasingly insists on unnecessary remakes and questionable franchises. Crucially, though, he has always sought to tuck art into the margins, to inscribe even a moribund effort such as “Dark Shadows” (2012) with something resembling a personal signature. It’s worth noting that his last picture before “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” was one of his most subversive: a wildly eccentric live-action remake of Disney’s “Dumbo” that all but repudiated the Hollywood machinery that spawned it.
“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” for its part, evinces a certain skepticism about artists, entertainers, and the moneyed industries that keep them afloat. Delia, who opts to mine the family’s bereavement for her next big multimedia project, is held up for some lighthearted art-world satire. So is Lydia’s talk show, which, though rooted in real-life paranormal activity, is not immune to charges of ghoulish exploitation. One of the movie’s funnier new characters is a ghost detective, played by Willem Dafoe, who used to be an actor and now can’t stop playing to nonexistent cameras. He’s trapped not just in the afterlife but in the non-stop theatre of his own mind.
If “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” looks mildly askance at Hollywood, it nonetheless qualifies as something of a corrective among recent studio sequels. The movie is hardly its predecessor’s equal in conceptual richness or comic inspiration, which is fine, because it knows that duplicating the experience was never the task to begin with. The script, by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, has its share of bum lines and misfired jokes, but placed alongside, say, the dutiful fan service of “Alien: Romulus,” or the smarmy meta-shenanigans of “Deadpool & Wolverine,” the writing is practically a model of originality, and of relentless forward momentum. Where its predecessor kept a foot planted in reality, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” barrels through the underworld with an ever-looser, crazier Looney Tunes energy. The sequel’s visual design, too, is deeper and subtler than the original’s, and Burton’s panoply of visual tricks has grown in tandem with his sense of mischief. In the first film, Betelgeuse spun his head like Regan MacNeil; now he can cheerfully disembowel himself and, with exuberant nastiness, send his lower digestive tract spilling out onto the floor.
Keaton is as splendidly, mangily disreputable as ever, even though, as before, Betelgeuse remains faintly peripheral, more impish sideshow attraction than main event. That’s as it should be. There is something slyly poignant about the fact that, while Betelgeuse hasn’t changed much—how much can one change after centuries in the afterlife?—the two older Deetz women very much have. Delia has grown warmer, wackier, and less supercilious; O’Hara, a genius of comedy, gives her a faint dash of Moira Rose dottiness. Lydia, in Ryder’s touching, jittery performance, has sacrificed her youthful self-possession for full-blown grownup anxieties, with perhaps a side order of her stepmother’s neuroses. It falls to Ortega’s Astrid, the designated breath of fresh air in this determinedly musty crypt of a movie, to diagnose their condition. When someone notes that death is hard, she offers the only sensible reply: “Yeah, sometimes I think life is harder.”♦
