Review Double Feature: Beetlejuice (1988) and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

Another double feature, and once again, it's a classic movie and its nostalgic, decades-later sequel. How do they fare?

Beetlejuice (1988)

Rated PG

Score: 5 out of 5

While Beetlejuice wasn't the first movie that Tim Burton ever made, it was the one that made him a goth icon, turning his name into a byword for a particular kind of style that has at least one foot in the horror genre and is often rich in gothic flair but combines it with a strong dose of comedy and whimsy. In this case, he takes a classic horror movie premise, that of a family moving into a new house only to find out that it's haunted by ghosts that don't want them there, and turns it completely on its head by making the ghosts the protagonists and using that setup as the basis for a riotous comedy, powered largely by the force-of-nature performance of Michael Keaton in his comic prime as the titular villain. It still stands as one of Burton's best movies and one of the best comedies of the '80s, especially for the less raunchy end of the genre (even if I wouldn't by any means call this a family film, inexplicable PG rating aside), powered by an all-star cast and an early version of Burton's unique style that was already apparent here. It's a movie where, the moment you see it, you don't need to ask why it's a classic, you just know.

Our protagonists are Adam and Barbara Maitland, a young couple living in the idyllic small town of Winter River, Connecticut who have just died in a car accident. What's more, when they get to the afterlife, they find a tangled bureaucracy that tells them that they have to spend 125 years in their house before they can move on, which means that they have to watch as a new family, the Deetzes, move in from the city and renovate their beautiful home into the modernist art project of the stepmom Delia's dreams and the Maitlands' nightmares. As such, they make it their mission to scare the Deetzes out of the house, easier said than done given the Maitlands' easygoing nature, the fact that the Deetz family's yuppie patriarch Charles sees dollar signs in a possibly haunted house, and the fact that the Deetzes' gloomy teenage daughter Lydia can see them and ain't scared of no ghosts. Out of desperation, the Maitlands turn to the "bio-exorcist" Betelgeuse (pronounced "Beetlejuice") for help, only to get far more than they bargained for.

The secret to Burton's success in his glory days was that, while his movies were spooky, they were very rarely scary. Burton is a man who has a clear affection for classic horror movies and injects their style into his own work, but doesn't necessarily try to replicate the actual terror, instead using that style to make comedies and dramas about offbeat people who are actually pretty normal once you get to know them. In this case, he made what's basically Poltergeist as a comedy, with the ghosts getting as much character as the living humans. Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis make for a great comic duo as the dorky yet lovable ghosts who are utterly clueless at being horror movie ghosts. They lift macabre imagery from contemporary '70s and '80s horror movies as they try to frighten their home's unwelcome new inhabitants, but John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper they ain't, and they come off as just lovably pathetic instead as they can't even get Charles and Delia to acknowledge their existence. They're Clark and Ellen Griswold as ghosts, slowly but surely melting down in frustration.

They're not the real reason everybody remembers this movie, though. It is, after all, titled Beetlejuice and not Adam & Barbara, and Michael Keaton walks away with the entire film. Beetlejuice being a comic character may have softened his nastiness and kept this rated PG, but he is otherwise presented as an absolute creep, a guy who sexually harasses every woman he meets, ruins the lives and unlives of everyone of any gender he meets, and looks like a disheveled drunk who isn't allowed within a thousand feet of a school, which only makes his plans for Lydia come off that much worse. (Apparently, the original version of the script made it explicit.) He's a whirlwind of chaos and destruction who, for all his comic presentation, brings the film the closest it comes to being actually scary, like if you took the lower-class lout character from other '80s comedies and recast him as a supernatural villain. There's a reason why Keaton, before his turn towards drama, was one of the biggest comedy stars of the '80s, making both the slapstick and the dialogue feel effortless as he makes both the Deetzes' lives and the Maitlands' afterlives into Hell on Earth.

The other character who's become synonymous with this movie is Winona Ryder's Lydia Deetz, who likely inspired the goth phases ("it's not a phase, Mom!") of an entire generation of teenage girls in the '90s. Her look was instantly iconic, and fortunately, Ryder didn't just let the costume department do all the work for her character. If Lydia comes off in 2024 as something of a cliché, then that's because she helped create the cliché, the archetypal moody teenager of any number of family comedies past and present combined with an interest in the supernatural and a heart of gold beneath her creepy exterior. She's Wednesday Addams as a teen in a yuppie family that doesn't understand her, a few years before Christina Ricci made that character her own, to the point that the only thing that surprises me about the show Wednesday is that it took Burton so long to get the chance to take a crack at a proper Addams Family adaptation. Her parents, meanwhile, serve as her utter antithesis, with Jeffrey Jones making Charles a man who desperately needs to get a clue (especially once his reaction to a haunted house is to turn it and the town around it into a tourist attraction) and Catherine O'Hara having the time of her life as Delia, a full-of-herself artist who it's implied married Charles for his money and whose aesthetic tastes are a comically grotesque parody of everything that people make fun of modern art for. From the moment you meet them, you understand immediately why the Maitlands want them the hell out of their home. If this movie has anything on its mind other than its horror parody and its visual flair, it's making fun of yuppies, and while it's mostly the obvious jokes about how they're a bunch of pretentious dilettantes, they serve the film's style quite well.

And on the note of aesthetic tastes, while this wasn't the first movie that Tim Burton directed, it was the one that made him into "Tim Burton", and it still stands as one of the greatest demonstrations of his distinct and oft-imitated style. It is a special effects showcase, starting with a playful homage to '50s giant monster movies in the opening credits and continuing on with the varied looks of the ghosts we see later in the film, especially as the Maitlands explore an afterlife reminiscent of the worst DMV you've ever been to run by a scene-stealing Sylvia Sidney as a salty, seen-it-all bureaucrat who's Not in the Mood for Your Shit. The music, too, does wonders to set the mood, from Danny Elfman's legendary score that sounds like an '80s New Wave remix of a classic horror soundtrack (as befitting a former member of Oingo Boingo) to the heavy use of Harry Belafonte in some key moments. The look and feel of the film matches the tone of the writing and story, spooky but playful, which makes the jokes that much funnier once they start rolling almost immediately. That said, it's always grounded in something resembling reality, in this case a version of small-town New England drawn less from Stephen King than Norman Rockwell. It's what makes the supernatural mayhem hit that much harder (incidentally, the reason why King himself set so many stories in small-town Maine, before his own style was copied to the point of cliché), and honestly, I think it's the difference between this and other early Burton films on one hand and his late-period decline on the other. A lot of Burton's humor, here most of all, was rooted in the juxtaposition of classically gothic imagery with life in modern America, often suggesting that it was in fact the former that was more level-headed and "normal" than our society that, in its obsession with status and the appearance of normality, can often turn quite whacked-out in its own way. Burton kind of lost sight of this with his later films, but in his earlier movies like this, he was a master at it.

The Bottom Line

Like any great comedy, it's hard to describe in words without ruining the best parts, so I'll just leave it at this: Beetlejuice is still a classic after 36 years. It's a simple movie, but that just means it can sharpen its focus and deliver a hell of a spoof of supernatural horror.

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And now, for the sequel...

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024 A.D.)

Rated PG-13 for violent content, macabre and bloody images, strong language, some suggestive material and brief drug use

Score: 3 out of 5

If Beetlejuice was Tim Burton at his best, then Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is, for better or worse, an encapsulation of late-period Burton, both his continued strengths as a filmmaker and the points where he's lost his touch. The plot is perfunctory, a mess of multiple different storylines butting heads with each other, with Monica Bellucci seemingly only being here as the villain because Tim Burton has a Type while an actual, more interesting villain was wasted. It felt like screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar had tried to cram an idea for a Beetlejuice TV series, or multiple different first drafts from different writers over the course of over three decades, into a feature film, with lots of plot threads that went nowhere and were wrapped up far too hastily for my liking. The first movie wasn't exactly that deep, but this makes it look downright intellectual. But when it comes to the things that Burton's name is associated with, from creepy visuals to a twisted sense of humor, this movie roars to the point that I was able to largely shut off my brain and enjoy it. The returning cast is great, not least of all Michael Keaton demonstrating that he hasn't lost a step even after he became a dramatic actor, while Jenna Ortega gets another opportunity to demonstrate why she's one of the biggest young stars of her generation. The humor is as on-point as it was last time, and while the special effects have a much bigger budget than they did before, they haven't lost the practical, handmade charm of the original. There's more of a focus on horror this time, but much of it comes proudly paired with the comedy, from deaths straight out of Looney Tunes to a running gag about the fate of Charles from the first film that I'm surprised got by with a PG-13 rating. As far as nostalgia-bait sequels are concerned, this one did most of what it needed to, if little else.

The film starts with a grown-up Lydia Deetz, now the host of a talk show dedicated to the supernatural, and her teenage daughter Astrid, a student at a boarding school who believes that ghosts aren't real and that her mother is either crazy or a grifting hack, being called home to Winter River, Connecticut after Charles Deetz dies gruesomely in a plane crash. (He survived the actual crash; shame about the shark in the water around the crash site.) Meanwhile, in the afterlife, Beetlejuice is still plugging away at his bio-exorcist gig, while Delores, the evil witch he married in life who's still pissed at him after they killed each other (the feeling is mutual), escapes from her prison thanks to some carelessness and proceeds to go on a soul-sucking rampage hoping to take her revenge on her ex. Along the way, Lydia's douchebag boyfriend and producer Rory proposes to her out of the blue, Astrid meets a cute boy in town named Jeremy who's into the supernatural, and Delia... doesn't actually get to do much, but any excuse to get Catherine O'Hara back in full form is good in my book.

There are a lot of plot threads going on here, enough that I think I might have missed a few of them, which kind of highlights the biggest problem this movie has, that it's overstuffed with plot and doesn't really have much of an actual story. Even by the third act after everything's started to come together, the plot about Lydia rescuing Astrid from the afterlife with Beetlejuice's help and the plot about Delores hunting down Beetlejuice barely have anything to do with each other, with the former settled in an anticlimatic fashion only to promptly segue into the next as Delores literally barges in. An important plot point hinges on Lydia, a woman obsessed with the supernatural and the dark side of life, being clueless about a grisly true-crime story in her own childhood hometown. This movie does a lot of things right, but its writing is not one of them. It tries to do far too much plot-wise, and it largely faceplants every time it asks me to focus on such. It's a shame, because, while Monica Bellucci had almost nothing to do in this movie beyond look creepy and sexy in that distinct Burtonesque way (see also: Lisa Marie, Helena Bonham Carter, Eva Green), she did it well, and I wanted to see more of her. A better movie would've found a way to incorporate Delores more directly into the plot, perhaps by having her use Lydia or Astrid to get to Beetlejuice, and given Bellucci more of a chance to shine.

Fortunately, this movie didn't forget to do the same for its other top-billed stars. Michael Keaton still has it as a comic actor, and Beetlejuice is still the same force of nature he was before, a guy who's about as profane as the PG-13 rating will allow and feels eager to punch through its bounds. Catherine O'Hara's Delia, like Delores, doesn't really get much of a plot, but she does at least get to make for some hilarious comic relief, still the same shallow yuppie arteeste she was in the '80s and one whose knowledge of the reality of the afterlife has simply given her false hope of finding Charles again. Winona Ryder and Jenna Ortega together get most of the dramatic arc of the film as the mother and daughter Lydia and Astrid, both of them turning in solid performances and Ortega in particular feeling very much like the heir to '90s Ryder in terms of being the one you cast when you want someone who can play a moody teenager really well. (One missed opportunity, though: I think the funniest version of Astrid would've been to make her the biggest girly girl imaginable, one who embraced a life in pink as her own form of rebellion against her goth mother. Not only would it have made sense given the tension between the two, it also would've done a great job of sending up Ortega's typecasting.) The supporting cast, meanwhile, was a who's who of fun bits, from Justin Theroux as Lydia's vapid boyfriend and spiritual guru who feels very much like a male version of Delia (maybe Lydia hasn't escaped her mother's influence as much as she thought) to Willem Dafoe as a Hollywood action hero who died doing his own stunts and now gets to be a loose cannon cop for real in the afterlife chasing Delores and Beetlejuice.

And when it comes to Burton himself, he brings a lot of this movie's best parts. Once I accepted that this was gonna be one of those movies where the plot made no damn sense and wasn't worth following, I stayed for the humor and the style, and this movie largely sticks to what worked last time even if they've got more money to throw around for the effects now. Jeffrey Jones' very public disgrace (I'll spare you the details, but let's just say he was really lucky he didn't land up in prison) means that this movie takes every opportunity it can to piss on Charles' grave with some of the most backhanded "tributes" I can imagine, his over-the-top death rendered in a stop-motion animated sequence being just the start. The afterlife is once again full of cool-looking ghosts whose appearances let you know right away exactly how they died, and while the balance of comedy and horror this time leans more towards actually trying to be scary, the kills are still goofy and cartoonish enough that it manages to remain lighthearted and fun. As a visual stylist, Burton has always been distinct even in his lesser films, and while there's nothing here that's particularly groundbreaking, it's always at least fun to watch.

The Bottom Line

"Nothing particularly groundbreaking, but at least fun to watch" sums up my thoughts on this movie in general. It's kinda dumb and needed a top-to-bottom rewrite, but as a showcase for a great comic cast and a lot of spooky and cool special effects, I had a good time. Check it out.