Film review: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Though not his first movie, it was 1988’s Beetlejuice that properly introduced the idea of Tim Burton to the world. Flipping the haunted house notion on its head, its tale of a recently-deceased couple trying to keep new living occupants from their house with the help of a demonic ‘bio-exorcist’, the almost-titular Betelgeuse, allowed the director’s imagination to run riot. Behold, it declared, Hollywood's greatest new oddball.

Beetlejuice was an explosion of comic-book gothic grandeur, macabre weirdness, camp pomp, twisted visual gags and over-vivid colour that created the perfect cinematic world for its story. Aided by knockout performances from Michael Keaton as the sleazy, smooth-drawling leading undead scumbag, and Winona Ryder as the sassy teen who gets the better of him, plus a creepy, kooky score by Danny Elfman that did a similar job for him as the movie did for Tim, it made icons of both the movie and its director.

Talk has long persisted of a follow-up. Now it has belatedly but inevitably arrived, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is kind of Beetlejuice: The Next Generation. Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz is all grown up, a TV host with a ghost show of her own. She’s also got a daughter, Astrid (an excellently moody and dry-humoured Jenna Ortega), not a fan of her mother’s strange behaviour and talk of ghosts to the point it’s created a rift. Lydia’s own mother Delia (Catherine O’Hara), meanwhile, is recently widowed, following the death of her husband Charles, who’s been bitten in half by a shark.

The three return to the family mansion, along with Lydia’s clearly terrible and manipulative partner, Rory. Her sightings of Beetlejuice – all in her head, she thinks – get worse, until he’s accidentally summoned again. As things unfurl for the three generations of Deetz women, they begrudgingly realise they need his help to sort things out.

Not that he hasn’t got problems of his own – namely his ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci), part of a witch cult who’s got her head together 600 years after being chopped up by her husband (in self-defence), and has returned as a soul-sucking ghoul out for revenge.

It’s very funny and very surreal, and the updates largely work. Beetlejuice’s business in Purgatory has grown into a morbid call centre, while the bureaucracy of being dead has become even more of a drag. Jenna Ortega fits into things brilliantly, wearing the shoes of her mother in the original while making the new role entirely hers.

Monica Bellucci is frighteningly good, a born scream queen playing it with a cold, straight bat in an underworld of mayhem, the sort of terrifying, deadly beauty that could scare even Beetlejuice. Meanwhile, there's an outrageously hammy turn by Willem Dafoe as hard-boiled TV cop Wolf Jackson, killed doing his own stunts and now trying to clean up the afterlife.

The 'Juice himself has become an even seedier but somehow more likeable sandworm-oil salesman than in the original. Like then, Michael Keaton is having a whale of a time playing the green-haired goon, with a sack of shitty jokes and noisy shtick.

Plot-wise, you’ll get more out of it if you’re au fait with the original, but the different strands of the story stand out enough on their own: Lydia having to re-engage with Beetlejuice and her trauma; Astrid having a hell of a time realising everything she dislikes about her mother is both real and dangerous, and that boys should not be trusted; Delia extrovertly dealing with her grief for her husband; Beetlejuice trying to stay one step ahead of the furious Delores. Even the awkward stumbling block of original Charles Deetz actor Jeffrey Jones being convicted of child sex offences in 2003 is nimbly dealt with by killing his character, and having his soul represented by a body with no head.

It could do with taking a bit longer to tie everything up at the end, particularly Astrid’s doomed romance storyline, and some have found the amount of look-backs and references distracting. But that’s half the point here.

Either way, the return of Beetlejuice is as sharp, funny, gross, oddly touching and deeply bizarre as you’d want it to be, and as it needs to be. He was bound to come back. Thank The Devil he’s made the wait worthwhile.

Verdict: 4/5

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is released on September 6 via Warner Bros.