The ghost with the most is back for more spooky doings!
BQB here with a review.
Beetlejuice, the titular demon and bio-exorcist who ghosts hire to torment the living, last graced our TVs a whopping 36 years ago. Reagan was president. The Soviets were in power. SNL was still funny. People only talked on stationary phones that never left their homes or offices. That’s how long it’s been since Michael Keeton’s popular funny dead guy has been out of our lives.
Although, he’s been gone, he was never forgotten, and has been long cemented in pop culture. Heck, even this blogger saw the Broadway play based on the original movie and it was a hoot. I actually think that production revived interest in the IP such that Hollywood said it’s Beet’s chance to ride again.
Alas, Hollywood’s obsession with sequels and reboots often leaves us feeling like our long lost movie friends would have been better off dead, rather than resurrected as pale, zombie imitations of their former selves, projects that were hot for their time have no relevance in a different world except for the shameless cash grab.
Overall, I give the movie a solid B Plus. It’s worth a trip to the theater to get you in the spooky mood this Halloween season. It meant all the sentimental needs, thus the B, but I’ll be honest. I didn’t laugh. For me, there were a few mild chuckles here and there, but I couldn’t help but notice that when you compare the two films, there was a lot of naughty humor in the first that couldn’t really be repeated in today’s woke times, if repeating jokes even works. Sometimes there’s a movie like the original that’s just a perfect one and done that it is hard to top.
But this is a good homage. The plot? Charles Deetz, like Marley, is dead to begin with. His character is included in humorous ways, yet great, outlandish and often silly lengths are taken to hide his face, presumably because the actor who played him, Jeffrey Jones, was convicted on child porn possession charges in 2003 and is now a registered sex offender. Since the character is now dead and fans might recall what dead people look like in the original, one can only imagine.
The Deetz family’s matriarch brings the Deetz family back to their home in CT for the funeral. Lydia (Winona Ryder) now uses her gift/curse of being able to see ghosts like her old friends, the Maitlands, to cash in on a TV show where she communicates with ghosts who haunt houses. Delia (Catherine O’Hara) still produces wacky art that is more about her eccentric moods that anything artistic.
Newcomer and daughter/granddaughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) is brought home from boarding school. She is estranged from Lydia because she believes her mother’s ghost communication ability is a crock.
Even more newbies to the cast arrive. Justin Theroux plays Lydia’s weaselly fiance. Arthur Conti plays Astrid’s love interest.
The first half hour moves slowly. We don’t get as much Beetlejuice as we would like. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot but briefly, we discover that in his living days, the B-Man was married and that union didn’t go so well. His now deceased wife, Delores (Monica Belucci) is looking for revenge, stalking the underworld and leaving behind a trail of dead corpses. Someone will have to explain the logic of how dead people can be killed again, but try not to think too hard.
Wolf Jackson (Willem DeFoe) a former Hollywood actor/on screen cop who died performing one deadly stunt too many, is on the case. Somehow, amidst this crazy backdrop, Beetlejuice must avoid his ex, while seizing his second chance to chase Lydia now that the Deetzes are back in the house that serves as a portal to him and blah blah blah, some hijinx ensue where Lydia begrudgingly needs the services of her tormentor and they have to work together.
The Maitlands? Stricken from the film. Director Tim Burton said he did this to focus on the story of three generations of Deetz women working together, but I wonder if it had more to do with Alec Baldwin’s legal troubles vis a vis accidentally shooting a crew member on a movie a couple years ago. That shouldn’t have prevented Geena Davis from gracing us with at least a cameo, right? I mean, can’t ghost couples get divorced? And before you point out the discrepancy of ghosts aging, Keaton’s age is hidden because, well, his character looked like a dead guy 36 years ago so all he had to do was just put the makeup on again.
Speaking of, I applaud the film for relying more on makeup and low tech effects and less on CGI. There are plenty of ornery dead folk walking around, people in this world seem destined to live out their afterlives suffering from whatever killed them, ergo they’re walking around with knives in the head, piranhas to the face and so on. Rather than do that with CGI, Burton relies on good old fashioned makeup, which looks a lot better.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy.
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