‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ Review: It’s A Wonderful Afterlife For Tim Burton’s Joyously Macabre Sequel – Venice Film Festival
Oh no, you’ve done it now: You said that name three times, so he’s out!
Yep, it’s Michael Keaton’s compellingly horrible undead Beetlejuice, still large as life and twice as unnatural, still with the sweaty black circles around his eyes, still barking and twitching like an automaton gone rogue. Thirty-five years after he last created havoc in the Deetz family’s attic, he’s back to resume courting Lydia Deetz, whose clairvoyant gifts as a child meant she could see Beetlejuice when nobody else could. Beetlejuice, being disgusting on many levels, decided they had a psychic bond and were destined to be together. There’s only 6,000 years between them, after all.
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But things have moved on, as they do even in white-picket-fence towns with covered bridges. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is not so much a sequel — which is usually just a working franchise serving up more of the same — as a kooky, spooky school reunion where you find out what happened to the class weirdo. As it turns out, everyone in Winter River already knows what goth girl Lydia did: She became a medium on cheesy TV show Ghost House, where people ask for help with their hauntings. At 50, she is brittle, pill-popping, obsessed with the dead and entirely at a loss as to how to connect with her daughter, who is very much alive and given a lot of spark by Jenna Ortega. (Ortega, as the star of the Wednesday series, is the youngest of Tim Burton’s regulars).
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The story by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar and longstanding Burton associate Seth Grahame-Smith revolves — erratic as the orbits of many of its elements may be — around Lydia. Her father has gone missing in action on a birdwatching trip, but she has reached a truce with her socially ambitious concept-artist stepmother Delia; Catherine O’Hara is back in that role, her pinpoint comic timing better than ever. Lydia is teetering on the edge of marrying her producer, Rory (Justin Theroux), who scooped her up on a yoga retreat and who communicates almost entirely via New Age buzzwords. As a man, he comes across as a rather creepy desk calendar.
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It must have been so much fun collecting those self-help platitudes. Actually, everybody here — from the old Burton clan to the newcomers, who also include Monica Bellucci as Delores, a malevolent corpse stuck together with staples; Willem Dafoe as an actor forever playing a cop in the underworld; and Arthur Conti as an intense young man who spends his days reading Dostoevsky in his childhood treehouse — is obviously having fun to burn. A lot of the appeal of a Burton fantasy is that you just want to play in their yard.
But it’s also a blast just to watch. The first Beetlejuice in 1988 captured imaginations because it was new, unlike anything else and deliciously tasteless while being, to be honest, pretty clunky. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is not clunky. Yes, there are plenty of animation joins that haven’t been smoothed over by CGI. Some of the props look like tat Burton bought in a flea market. But it also has a proper plot, full of twists and turns; a terrific cameo characters supporting the impeccable main cast; a meticulous spoof Italian horror film in the middle of it all; and a climactic musical number in which key cast members mime to Richard Harris’ 1968 pop hit “Macarthur Park” while dancing around a giant cake with icing the exact green of snot. A ghost-driven dance to Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O” in the first Beetlejuice was hilarious because it was just so ludicrous. This, however, is a proper showpiece.
But Beetlejuice Beetlejuice also is funny, all the time. Burton is a horror enthusiast — the black-and-white Italian sequence in this film is an homage to Mario Bava, often described, like Burton himself, as a master of the macabre. It is true that he relishes the grotesque, going all-out with buckets of snakes emerging when Beetlejuice literally spills his guts, but nothing is actually scary. The newly dead are cast into occasional peril in a desert heaving with giant, ghost-eating sandworms, but there’s no suspense or sense of danger. People who die are dispatched quickly and apparently painlessly. It’s what comes afterward that can be bewildering.
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Even then, unless you get trapped working for its eternal bureaucracy, that looks like a pretty good time. All your fellow dead with axes stuck in their skulls or dead piranhas bobbing around their ears are bizarre personages you would never meet in a month of Sundays in Winter River. And once you’ve spent a few thousand years filling out forms, it’s all aboard the Soul Train — after a groovy wait on the platform with hep cats disco dancing, just like they did on the famous TV show — for the Great Beyond. Thanks to TB and his merry band of pranksters, the afterlife really does seem like something to look forward to.
Title: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Festival: Venice (Out of Competition)
Distributor: Warner Bros
Release date: September 6, 2024
Director: Tim Burton
Screenwriters: Alfred Gough, Miles Millar
Cast: Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, Jenna Ortega, Willem Dafoe, Arthur Conti
Rating: PG-13
Running time: 1 hr 45 min
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