BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE
****
Directed by Tim Burton.
Starring Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton, Jenna Ortega, Catherine O’Hara, Monica Bellucci, Justin Theroux, Willem Dafoe.
Horror Comedy, USA, 2024 104 mins, Cert 12
Out now in cinemas
We all approach remakes, reboots, requels (it’s not a word, is it) remaquelboots (this will probably be a real term at some point) to treasured films from our youth with immense trepidation and no shortage of cynicism. BEETLEJUICE has never gone away: one of the most lucrative and beloved Hollywood movies of 1988 (and a worthy Best Make-Up Oscar winner), it was followed by an excellent four-season ABC/Fox animated TV series (1989-91), various video game incarnations and Eddie Perfect’s 2018 musical with Adam Brightman in the title role. Meanwhile, as any reasonable person might expect, Tim Burton’s prolific directing career has veered from the sublime to the crushingly disappointing: in the decade leading up to the frankly awful PLANET OF THE APES, he directed the greatest BATMAN movie, the wonderful ED WOOD, the best 1996 Hollywood film about an alien invasion (MARS ATTACKS) and SLEEPY HOLLOW, a glorious love letter to vintage Gothic horror.
So…a BEETLEJUICE sequel? No rational person would want it to be terrible or treat its arrival with the dread you would normally reserve after a 12 week scan confirms your partner to be pregnant with the Antichrist. Great news: as soon as the monochrome Warner Bros. logo has faded away and the unmistakeable Danny Elfman title theme kicks in, you can relax: we’re in safe hands.
Co-written by Miles Millar and Alfred Gough, creators of Netflix’s WEDNESDAY – for which Burton directed several episodes – this gets everything right and, in an era of horribly overlong and conceptually empty blockbusters, gets the job done within a running time where you don’t need three toilet breaks and an extra-large tub of ice cream. If anything, it leaves you wanting to spend more time in its beautifully designed world.
With the absence of Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis flippantly dealt with, we catch up with Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder, looking fabulous), now a widower and host of a MOST HAUNTED-style supernatural reality show exploiting her gift / curse of seeing dead people. Stepmother Catherine O’Hara (typically great) shows up following the death of Lydia’s father: with disgraced actor Jeffrey Jones understandably absent, his character’s fate is conveyed in a marvellously gruesome fashion, compete with a stop motion depiction of a hilariously grim accident and a running gag about his squishy post-mortem existence.
Lydia’s resentful, Dostoevsky quoting / Climate Change activist daughter Astrid is played by a supremely well cast Jenna Ortega, the best thing about WEDNESDAY and perfectly at home in the part. She unwittingly summons Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton, as wonderful in the role as you remember) via the Handbook for the Recently Deceased in her Dad’s possessions. Justin Theroux is a hoot as Lydia’s over-sensitive producer / fiancée, Burn Gorman a deadpan joy as Father Damien and Monica Bellucci (though under-used) a striking figure, channelling Barbara Steele as Beetlejuice’s ex-wife Delores. She’s an embittered, soul-sucking witch who, having stapled herself back together from a dismembered state, has the ability to make Beetlejuice “dead dead”. Willem Dafoe, having an incredible movie year, is great fun as a cheesy 80s-style action star named Wolf Jackson.
There’s lots going on here – including a sustained nod to IT’S ALIVE – and, at times, Keaton feels like a guest star in the movie bearing his character’s name (twice). Knowing references to the original film (“The Banana Boat Song”, multiple “Bobs”) alternate with a remarkable array of grisly visuals for a 12-rated movie, going beyond the cartoonish eyeball-popping grotesquerie of the original and more toward the blood-squirting, gut-spilling gross-outs of R-rated 1980s horror comedies. Needle drops are terrific: throwaway jokes involving Richard Marx and The Bee Gees alternate with a literal “Soul Train”, while two versions of “MacArthur Park” culminate with a show-stopping, Richard Harris-accompanied church interlude that’s the standout set piece of either BEETLEJUICE movie.
Best of all, horror fans will get a major kick out of the niche genre references worked into a $100 million blockbuster. The dialogue directly name-checks Mario Bava (“My waters broke during KILL, BABY, KILL!”), and a stunning black and white, subtitled exposition sequence, like SLEEPY HOLLOW, pays loving homage to that director’s magnificent BLACK SUNDAY. There’s even an extended Brian De Palma parody, complete with a classic modern horror cue from Pino Donaggio.
The icing on the cake? The many names, in a CGI-dominated era, of animatronic / make-up effects artists and stop motion animators in the closing credits.
Steven West
