BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE

THREE AND A HALF STARS When her daughter is taken to the underworld, Lydia reluctantly calls for help.

COMEDY US English #BEETLEJUICEBEETLEJUICE

Starring Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton

Whatever you do, don’t say his name three times! Not unless you want to make a sequel of course in which case, go crazy. And this is largely what happens in Tim Burton’s wildly entertaining, somewhat chaotic follow up to his 1988 hit about a sleazy ghost/spirit/demon intent on marrying a teenage girl so he can escape the afterlife. More a series out of control sub-plots laden with rapid-fire gags and spooky shocks than a fully formed film, BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE still has all the energy of the first and plenty to spare.

From the opening scene careering high above the town of Winter River to Danny Elfman’s thrillingly jaunty score, Burton signals we’re not going to stray from the formula that made his original such a hit. Good news. Better news, the original cast are back with a few extras (Willem Dafoe, Monica Bellucci, Danny DeVito) thrown in for good measure. Down on the ground however, the news is not so great. 

35 years have passed since Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) was trying to escape Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton). These days she hosts a hokey TV series about the paranormal, has a terrible relationship with her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) who thinks she’s a fraud, a terrible relationship with her artist/mother (Catherine O’Hara) who’s more self-indulgent and less self-aware than ever and a terrible relationship with her manager/boyfriend (Justin Theroux) who’s simply an oily grifter. Then they get news that her dad died in a plane crash. Well, he died after the crash when he was eaten by a shark. Everyone heads back to Winter River for the funeral.

The jokes line up just as thick and fast in the underworld. Beetlejuice now works in an afterlife call centre and if that wasn’t hellish enough, his ‘pissed’ ex-wife Delores (Bellucci) has stapled herself back together and is out for revenge. Meanwhile a TV cop/actor (Dafoe) is trying to stop her sucking the souls out of the dead (which makes them really dead) while up with the living Lydia’s daughter has fallen for a young man who may not be as alive as she thinks. When he tries to initiate a switcheroo, reclaim his life and leave Astrid for dead, Lydia does a deal with Beetlejuice which could save him, save her daughter and save the day.

Did I mention it’s chaotic?

Although most of this lands on the screen in an unholy mess, Burton’s unrelenting force keeps it all together, more or less. Or as once character puts it, “the afterlife is so random”. While Bellucci’s character is more of an excuse for an extremely funny stapling scene set to the Bee Gees Tragedy (Why? No idea but it works), she’s otherwise wasted, disappearing for long patches of the film. Likewise Dafoe’s hilariously hammy franchise cop who’s raîson d’être seems to be for Dafoe to ham it up. Which he does, he’s having a ball and by extension, so do we. Then the crazy leaps into monochrome Italian horror when Beetlejuice riffs on Mario Bava to reveal how he first met Delores in the 14th century. It’s weird, it’s wild.

And it all starts to make some kind of sense once the Juice is set loose. Keaton, having barely aged under his panda-eyed prosthetics, bounces off the walls with more demonic chutzpah than he did 35 years ago. The scuzzball cunning that made him such a likeable, well, scuzzball is now a frenzied bin fire around which the whole show turns. It’s at it’s best when Burton gives himself permission to be himself, which is to say, weird. And it doesn’t get much weirder than the climatic wedding sequence lip-synching the most ridiculous song ever written (Richard Harris’s MacArthur Park). It’s top shelf bonkers.

While all these shenanigans may seem familiar - the no longer deliver the same kitschy jolt of the original - it’s unsurprising given Burton’s once-new aesthetic has since become mainstreamed. BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE may be slicker than the original, yet its flashes of B-Movie brilliance paired with sandworms, shrunken heads and not one but two serves of the most demonic baby since TRAINSPOTTING land with gleeful, rancid, hilarious morbidity. 

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