Director Report Card: Tim Burton (2024)

20. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

It seemed like one of those sequels that would probably never get made. After "Beetlejuice" became the tenth highest grossing movie of 1988, the producers immediately wanted a sequel. Tim Burton, Michael Keaton, and Winona Ryder were game to return. However, "Batman" soon made Burton the most in-demand director in Hollywood, while Keaton and Ryder's careers had their own wild ups and downs. Scripts with high-concept titles like "Beetlejuice in Love" and "Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian" were considered but nothing stuck. As years turned into decades, we'd still get the occasional update that the project was circling one strata of development or another, a new writer coming aboard, a reassurance from someone that the film was definitely going to happen. I know I had a strictly "I'll believe it when I see it" attitude by that point and I imagine many others did too.

In all that time, "Beetlejuice" somehow retained cultural relevance. A kids' cartoon, toys, appearances in theme parks, a successful stage musical, and perennial popularity as a Halloween costume kept the film and the character in people's minds. Despite that, the question remained in my mind: Do we need a "Beetlejuice 2?" In this age of legacy sequels and studios tirelessly chasing I.P.s, the idea of a CGI filled, watered down second appearance from the bio-exorcist didn't fill me with enthusiasm. After Burton had fallen to doing uninspired remakes for Disney and Netflix, it was hard to believe he still had, as it were, *the juice* for such a project. Commerce would not be denied, however, and the film's continued cult popularity kept Warner Brothers convinced a follow-up was a viable option. In 2022, a script finally took hold. Burton, Keaton, and Ryder all signed on. The director gave interviews talking up how he wanted to go back to the "handmade" aesthetic of the original. The buzz was positive. I remained skeptical. Burton had let me down too many times and the baggage of a 36 years later sequel still seemed difficult to overcome. As lights came up on my screening of the cleverly entitled "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice," I was surprised. My God, it was showtime again after all...

In the three and a half decades since the original, Lydia Deetz has become a successful television personality, using her ability as a medium to investigate haunted houses and communicate with the dead. Her personal life is in shambles though. The death of her late husband has left her with a fractured, distant relationship with her teenage daughter, Astrid. She's being romanced by her slimy manager, Rory. When news arrived that her father has died, she is pulled back to Connecticut for a funeral. Meanwhile, in the afterlife, Beetlejuice continues to operate as a sleazy businessman while still holding a flame for Lydia. When his soul-sucking ex-wife emerges for the first time since the Black Plague, the ghost with the most needs to find himself scarce. A convoluted series of events follows, the land of the dead and the land of the living overlapping again and Beetlejuice reaping more chaos in the Deetz' lives. 

By now, the blueprint for what they call "legacy sequels" – an unholy hybrid of sequel, reboot, and remake that successfully digs up decrepit brands for the modern age – has long been established. You get some of the old faces back. You fill the supporting cast with hot, young up-and-comers. You go out of your way to reference the original, often with a sense of awe and reverence. What you do not do is shake things up. The whole point of a legacy sequel is that it's safe. It serves no greater purpose than to remind people about what they liked the first time and to line studio execs' pockets. "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" does not entirely avoid these pitfalls. As you'd expect, much of the script revolves around Lydia's teenage daughter, played by the modern embodiment of the alienated goth princess archetype and experienced requel vet Jenna Ortega. The sequel certainly revisits many of the gags and set pieces from the original. The Sandworm reappears. The cast lip syncs to an old song. It ends at a wedding. Much of the iconography of the original is trotted back out on-screen, in hopes of triggering some dopamine in aging Gen-Xers and millennials by tickling our nostalgia bone.

What causes so many follow-ups of this type to feel hollow and mercenary is that they don't acknowledge the flow of time in any way but a surface level. I don't mean that merely within the narrative either. Movies do not look the same now as they did in the eighties. They don't sound the same either, as the Wall Street jackasses running Hollywood now think everyone in the audience is as stupid as they are and insists on scripts that explain everything. Like I said, "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" doesn't escape this. There's some supremely awkward dialogue that dishes out exposition for any youngster that hasn't seen the first. The central storyline, of Lydia and her disenfranchised daughter discovering they still love each other and moving pass the grief of their husband/father's death, is the modern boilerplate standard for these things. You coat the premise in some therapy-speak themes of trauma or grief or emotionally distant parents and that is supposed to be enough to modernize the old jalopy. There's a version of "Beetlejuice 2" that isn't that different from the one we got that is entirely tedious. 

However, a handful of factors largely prevent the sequel from having this ho-hum feeling. You can tell an actual attempt was made to recapture the look and feel of the original. When the eighties Geffin logo came up on-screen, I'm not going to lie that it sent a shiver of nostalgia up my spine. From there, the opening credits play over a tour of the miniature in the Maitland's attic, while the original font is used to present the names and Elfman's iconic score kicks in. But that's the easy stuff. What is more impressive is the sheer amount of practical effects and physical sets used. The afterlife seems to mostly be made up of actual locations built in a studio, using the same Expressionistic tilts and angles of the original. The ghouls, ghosts, and zombie died weirdos are largely the result of make-up, rubber, and latex. Effects that probably could have been done with CGI, like the spirits withering up after their souls are sucked, are instead done with fabulously rubbery puppets. A lot of filmmakers give lip service to doing things retro style while still filling the finished film with as much computer generated eye gouging as usual. Burton is certainly no stranger to this himself but "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" truly does seem to use computer effects as little as possible. The result is a film that isn't only closer to the original but also one that has a charm to it that is rarely seen in big budget franchise fair. 

Another important factor distinguishing "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" from many other attempts to revive old films is the sense that the people making this movie actually had fun doing it. Tim Burton's brand has, for years, been a safe and family friendly version of goth weirdness without any of the edge of "Batman Returns" that upset parent's groups so much. The "Beetlejuice" sequel sees the director returning to a love of gross-out gags that he frankly hasn't displayed in decades. The film is overflowing with slime, goop, ooze, and embalming fluid. The cartoony grotesqueness of the undead characters is right on display. Honestly, I was surprised at *how much* "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" emphasizes the horror part of horror/comedy. A reoccurring character had been bitten in half by a shark, their innards poking out and spurting blood all over the place. Beetlejuice literally "spills his guts," rubber intestine flooding into the room. It is, as far as the realm of one hundred million dollar studio sequels go, gross. It's weird and fetishic, Burton casting his wife as a stapled together zombie babe and Winona Ryder's belly inflating on-screen. It is, most shocking of all, unpredictable. Did I expect the film to depict flashbacks as amusingly ugly stop-motion cartoons? Or a lovingly assembled homage to Mario Bava's black and white films? I gotta tell you, I did not. And both moments are all the more delightful because of it. (Considering the way some scenes are lit and colored, Bava's later work is a probable influence too.)

That sense of chaotic fun is important to the movie's success. On a scripting level, "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" is a bit of a mess. The film has multiple subplots and a wide cast of characters. Many events in the story are nothing but contrived excuses to set up later scenarios. In the earlier scenes, a clever series of transitions are used to link the scenes in the living world and the afterlife but this is abandoned as the characters and careening storylines pile up. Ultimately though, I found myself not being bothered by this so much simply because, once again, there's a wacky energy to so many of these events that are infectious. Beetlejuice's villainous ex-wife doesn't add much to the story... But if you were married to Monica Belluci and wanted to put her in your movie as a stitched together gothic succubus, wouldn't you do it? Willem Dafoe appears as someone who was a B-movie action star in life and is now an actual detective in death, with half his skull blown off. And Dafoe hams it up gloriously, always keeping a straight face while playing this utterly ridiculous character. Justin Theroux is similarly over-the-top as Lydia's obvious ill-intentioned lover. Maybe it's all too much and the film scrambles to make room for it all. But everyone is having such a good time! I'm glad this shit is in the movie. 

Perhaps most importantly, the sequel gives the impression that it exists for reasons beyond making money for stockholders. While not a writer, Tim Burton has often expressed personal feelings through his film. "Nightmare Before Christmas" – which, yes, I know he didn't direct – tells the story of a mid-life crisis from someone who has achieved fame and success, shortly after Burton went from the guy who got kicked out of Disney for being too weird to the director of the highest grossing movie of 1989. "Ed Wood" reflects Burton's own relationships with his idols. Which causes one to consider Lydia Deetz' arc here as reflective of the director's own life. Much like Jack Skellington, she has achieved success and fame, via her medium show. This hasn't made her happy and, in fact, she feels like she's slipping. Other people are directing her life. She has no connection to her kid, having lost the macabre spark that bonded them. It takes confronting the past, rediscovering what excited and energized you before, for her to find her way again. I have no idea what Burton thinks of "Dumbo" or "Dark Shadows" or any of his other middling work from the last fifteen years. Drawing parallels between this story and his own career, however, seems hard to dismiss. 

There's a universal truth to some of the ideas here too. Last time we saw Lydia Deetz, she was the cool goth outsider who had managed to define herself based on her own weirdness. Now she's a parent and it's an unavoidable fact of the universe that every parent is, at some point in time, lame to their child. The script builds Lydia and Astrid's conflict around her mother closing herself off emotionally after Astrid's dad died. However, the scenes where Ryder and Catherine O'Hara interact, reminding her of how they treated each other at this age, suggests the movie should've gone further in this direction. In the original "Beetlejuice," Lydia thought her mom was a lame sell-out. The movie was on her side, so we thought her mom was a lame sell-out too. Now, Lydia has a kid who thinks she's a lame sell-out. On the other hand, Delia Deetz is a conceptual artist, still making weird and personal art at her age. This forces us to confront something uncomfortable: Maybe Lydia's mom is cool. Maybe she's always been cool. Which mirrors many an angsty teenager's relegation about their own parents, in a way. We come to understand them as we get older and, especially, after we become parents ourselves.

Growing old and maturity is an idea floating around inside the sequel's head. It's no doubt i intentional that Lydia has changed so much in this time while Beetlejuice has remained exactly the same creep he's always been. Burton's body of work is mostly an example of arrested development, the director recycling the same themes of outsiders struggling within a bland society for the last thirty years. You see signs that, like so many people his age, Burton is dismissive of modern politically correct culture. There's a few weird jokes about trigger warnings and modern youths being too sensitive. The finale features Beetlejuice sucking a whole horde of influences into their cellphones, a rather literal metaphor. (Not to mention a gag about "Soul Train," a joke you'd expect someone born in 1958 to make. Though I kind of liked that one...) However, the film proves more subversive than I expected. Astrid's subplot involves her crashing her back into a tree and meeting a boy her age named Jeremy. They bond over being awkward outsiders who like vinyl and Halloween. These scenes are cute while also representing the same sort of adolescent fantasy Burton has always worked in. A shy boy who stays in his room all day and reads Doestoesvsky sees the perfectly quirky, beautiful, sardonic girl with black bangs almost literally fall out of the sky on front of him. Honestly, Ortega and Arthur Conti are so good at playing these kind of characters that I managed to find this subplot, no matter how juvenile it is, charming. However, this proceeds a surprising twist that suggests, perhaps, Burton is a little more aware of the toxic qualities of the shut-in outsider sensitive boys that he's spent so much of his career rhapsodizing. 

You'll notice that, throughout this whole review, I haven't talked about the title character that much. As in the original film, the sequel makes a conscious decision to limit the rowdy spirit's screentime. During the long developmental process for "Beetlejuice 2," I'm sure there was a temptation to soften the character. After all, he did already star in a Saturday morning cartoon that depicted him and Lydia as being best friends. Luckily, the sequel maintains Beetlejuice's characterization as a villain. He's a sleazy, gross, betraying bastard who is only out for himself. We can relish in his bad behavior, as he rebels against polite society, but he's still a scumbag. The script actually finds a fairly clever way to get us a few scenes of Lydia and stripped spectre paling around without forgetting that she's completely disgusted by him, the heroes reluctantly having to call on his help. Despite the three decades that have passed, Michael Keaton hasn't lost a beat with this guy, clearly having a great time playing the badly behaving boogieman. Keaton's career revival has been satisfying but seeing him ham it up again like this is what I've been missing. Good to know he's still got it. 

"Good to know he's still got it" is, in fact, largely my reaction to "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" in many ways. It's obviously not as fresh as the original and is held back by some of the modern conventions of big budget cinema. However, it's a ultimately a highly entertaining motion picture, full of a tactile visual playfulness I didn't expect. A gory ending that references a horror classic – while clearly poking fun at the recent tendency to turn iconic characters into cute baby versions studios can sell toys of – confirms an attempt by its director to recapture a nastiness largely missing from his recent endeavors. I don't want to call it a comeback. I liked "Big Fish" and "Frankenweinie" too and those proceeded underwhelming follow-ups. Nevertheless, "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" escaping development hell and ending up being funny, weird, and gross is a victory in its own right. I still don't know if we needed a sequel to "Beetlejuice" but this film more than justifies its own existence with some fun performances, some great effects, and some slimy laughs. [Grade: B]