Graveyard Review: Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice

Also known as, everything I would change about this sequel

Whenever I watch or read anything, particularly something I like, I think about all the ways I might change it. I think this is a habit my husband and quite a few of my more creative also seem to do. We love nothing more than sitting and dissecting whatever we just watched, whether it be a movie or a TV show, to think about what could be done differently; whether its plugging plot holes, including different shots, or better explaining key threads.

I know a lot of other people aren’t huge fans of this approach. Art is art and it is to be received how the artist intended it. But in a culture of fandoms, remakes, nerdy Reddit threads, and adaptions it’s hard not to receive art in all its forms, as a two way street.

So don’t worry, this is just a bit of fun and not that deep.

This brings me to a sort of review of Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice (2024); a 30+ years in the making sequel to the 1980s Tim Burton cult classic. Spoilers and insufferable nerdiness lie ahead but also, some thoughts on everything I think could have been done better.

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👻 The ghost with the most

Full disclosure, Beetlejuice (1988) might be one of my all time favourite childhood movies. It’s not an amazing movie by any stretch but I’m not going to apologise for my fondness of it. While Tim Burton’s film-making reputation has slowly been eroded over the last two decades with what I can only describe as utter trash like Dark Shadows, questionable Hollywood associations, and a frankly irritating fandom of greebo’s who still haven’t read a book since Harry Potter, Beetlejuice is one of the few works that still holds up.

A quick refresh of the plot; The Deetz family move to a rural country house which is haunted byAdam and Barbara Maitland, reluctant ghosts following a car accident. When they fail to scare away the Deetz’s, they call upon the self-proclaimed bio-exorcist Beetlejuice to rid the living from their former home.

It has such a distinctive visual style which is ultimately what put Burton on the map. It also has four of the biggest movie stars of the ‘80s; Micheal Keaton, Geena Davis, Alec Baldwin and Catherine O’Hara, in key roles. It launched the career of Winona Ryder (Lydia Deetz - the icon for quirky goth girls everywhere) AND has a cameo by Robert Goulet. It’s camp, weird, funny, scary and plays around with a totally original concept - a haunted house from the perspective of the ghosts. It’s one of the classic ‘family’ movies of that era which straddled a fine line between ‘wacky stuff kids love’ and mature adult jokes.

Pure gold. Aside from some dated special effects I have no notes.

🪦 The premise

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice is of course a direct sequel. After numerous versions of a script spent 36 years in development hell, Burton has managed to wrangle almost all of the original cast with the exception of Jeffrey Jones who played Charles Deetz. (I mistakenly thought that, like Glen Shaddix, he had died but it turns out he was arrested for sex offences. 🥴 The way they handle his lack of appearance in the movie, while honouring the character is quite ingenious to say the least..)

Lydia is now an adult, and a paranormal specialist, with an estranged daughter of her own (Astrid is played here by Wednesday actress Jenna Ortega) and a new boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux) who doubles as her agent. When her father Charles dies in a dramatic accident, she and her step-mother Delia return to their formerly haunted home to pay their respects.

When Rory unexpectedly proposes that he and Lydia marry and Astrid meets a local boy, things escalate into a suitably supernatural affair. And while Beetlejuice is not summoned from the other side right away, he has problems of his own as his ex-wife Dolores (Monica Belluci) hunts him down to suck out his soul.

What’s good about it

💜 As mentioned, almost all the entire main cast return so it feels authentic and not like we’ve been cheated out of a decent for the sake of box office sales. Keaton and O’Hara still steal every single scene while staying completely true to their characters. Keaton famously described Beetlejuice as one of his favourite roles and it shows. There are also some great new additions in the form of the sleazy new-age nonsense peddler Rory and also Willem DeFoe as Wolf Jackson, the actor-come-undead-cop who unarguably has some of the funniest scenes.

💜 The costumes and set pieces are still amazing. The visuals were very much the spectacle of the first with stop motion special effects, practical techniques, and a host of dead people with inventive deaths - except this time it’s all bigger and better.

💜 And of course, it does a great deal of world building. You may recall in the first movie that entering the afterlife involved a surprising amount of admin such as The Handbook for the Recently Deceased, the purgatorial waiting room, and of course, that spirits get assigned a case worker to help navigate the difficulties of being dead.

This time we get to preview the other side even more; a world of surprisingly boring bureaucracy peppered with grotesque ghouls. It suggests that arriving in the afterlife is like one big transit station where queuing, papers, and passes are required to get around.

💜 The MacArthur Park scene is a big highlight and calls back the the ‘Day-O (Banana Boat’ scene of the first but with a fresh twist. Obviously also a banging tune.

What’s not so good about it

Here we go…

💀 The animation scene. They could have explained Charles’ death just as easy without it. And also, did we really need to see him again in the afterlife? Where’s the mystery!? A fun 30 second gag maybe but to me it complicates things and brings into question the whole physics of the afterlife that were explained to us in the first movie.

💀 Addressing the elephant in the room, or should I say the bombshell in the room; nobody understands why Monica Bellucci is there. In all honesty, there’s few people on the planet who will complain about getting to stare at Monica Bellucci on a big screen - even when she’s not doing much. But it could not be more obvious that she’s not only become Burton’s latest muse, but his latest girlfriend (yes really. He must be funny or something…). As he did with Lisa Marie - a woman whose acting is so laughably bad it’s good- and Helena Bonham Carter - a woman who has made a career of staring wildly, he has now placed Bellucci in possibly the most unnecessary and nonsensical role in history. You could lift out her entire storyline and it would make little difference to the plot - even for the sake of an ill-thought out origin story for Beetlejuice. I love Monica Bellucci but it’s a pass.

💀 There is also far too much going on; both simultaneously too quickly and too slowly all at the same time. I find it difficult to believe Lydia Deetz would grow up into the kind of woman who would not only neglect her own child but would allow herself to be exploited by some ponytailed freak. The wedding aspect seems a contrived way to squeeze another wedding scene in, while Delia’s death is glib even for a comedy that’s particularly glib about death. And they could have definitely benefitted from making the ‘evil cute dead boy next door taking your daughter to the underworld’ the main plot point and core escalation of the drama without all the other stuff.

💀 They also gloss over what happened to Adam and Barbara. Initially I was cool with them not being in this movie. I can understand why David and Baldwin didn’t return given that they are meant to be ghosts and have aged about 30 years however, the story doesn’t do a great job of explaining away their absence even though it absolutely needed touching upon. In one scene Lydia comments: ‘We found a loophole and they moved on!’

I thought this was going to be a significant plot point later on but no. We are never told what the loophole was, when, or why they found it. It is implied there is a Great Beyond and that life as a ghost or the other side is simply a mid-point but it’s not really explored enough. So we just have to accept ‘Oh, they left!’ And move on. Come on Tim!

💀 While we’re on the subject, the literal interpretation of the Soul Train did seem to contradict a lot of the ‘rules’ set in this made-up world, all for the sake of a gag / gimmick. Perhaps it’s my pedantic love of rules talking here, but if we are to believe the underworld we see is where dead people get stuck, then it tracks that everyone there appears either newly deceased, don’t realise they are deceased, and are trapped as ghosts and/or serving as civil servants in the afterlife due to the unexpected nature of their deaths - and equally why everyone appears to have died in gruesome and unusual circumstances.

So it makes literally no sense that the entire platform for the Soul Train is littered with disco dancing ghosts from the 1970s with flares and whatnot. Did they all die at a disco?! Surely it would have been funnier to keep the disco dancing for the weird shuffling ghouls who fit the above criteria, or to have the Soul Train be a miserable commuter train with over-zealous soul music blasting through it with it’s passengers in various states of gore? Like the London Underground on a Monday morning but with Donna Summer over the tannoy.

💀 I appreciate the irony of this but there was also TOO MUCH EXPOSITION. I take issue with a lot of post-modern films in that they often resort too much to telling rather than showing. It’s like they don’t trust their audiences to read between the lines or draw conclusions for themselves, and that’s likely because the culture of expanded universes and world building set by the likes of Marvel. This means that directors often seem to feel they that have to over-explain or spell out creative decisions in the script because the media illiterate among us aren’t clever enough to understand more subtle storytelling. For example, if we are to stick with the Lydia and Astrid are estranged narrative, do I really need to learn about their group therapy sessions or their inner dialogue? Can I not just assume some of this and have parts left open to my imagination? Not in this decade apparently…

💀 And finally, I was not into Astrid’s dead dad saving the day. Let me remind you of a classic ‘90s movie, Casper. In Casper (1995) the father of a young girl Cat, who befriends the titular friendly ghost, has dedicated his life’s work to researching the supernatural as a result of losing his wife, Cat’s mother. They play with the idea that ghosts stick around because they have ‘unfinished business’ and this is used as a reason as to why Casper still haunts their home (depressing child ghost) but why Cat and her father can’t and don’t interact with their mother/wife as a spirit.

This same idea could have been utilised really well here and would have created not only a lot of emotional tension, but closure. It would also fit with the idea that Adam and Barbara ‘moved on’ and the premise of the Soul Train taking people to ‘the Great Beyond’ once they’ve served their time (and got their paperwork). It would explain how they can break the rules set by the first film but still honour the mechanics of the system they’ve set up.

Instead they cop out and have gory ghost dad save Astrid in the afterlife, which then leaves open this entire weird thread that - like Beetlejuice - the dad could theoretically be contacted anytime and his existence has continued on. It kills any drama around his death and the impact it’s had on his family. It completely falls flat and raises more questions than answers. Because actually, did the dad even need to be dead in the first place? Do mothers and teenage girls not have enough tension between them even without a dead parent in the mix?

Yes this is a fantasy movie AND a horror AND a comedy, but I have no truck with silly decisions! This script is rushed, has too much fan service, and is too sloppy in places for me to sit back and enjoy the ride. And if people have to think too much about the logistics, you know you’re doing something wrong…

💚Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice

Overall it’s a fun silly film that’s enjoyable but isn’t a patch on the original. I love Michael Keaton and even though he is still at his very best in the role of Beetlejuice, even he can’t save this. A solid 6 or 7 out of 10.