Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Year 16, Day 297 - 10/23/24 - Movie #4,878 - VIEWED ON 9/14/24

BEFORE: The movie theater where I work part-time screened this film back in September, and I wasn't working the shift, so I had the opportunity to come in on my day off and watch the film for free.  I really had to think about it, because even though it fit RIGHT into my programming this year, there was also the opportunity to NOT watch it,  and save it for next October, when it could help me make connections to films like "Daybreakers" and Disney's recent remake of "The Haunted Mansion".  It was a difficult decision, because I haven't blocked out next year's chain, obviously, and sure, I could do whatever I can now to make connections easier next time around BUT also the flip-side of that is, I can't see the big picture, so there's a possibility that I could save it for 2025 and then NOT be able to link to it, for any number of random reasons. You can't eat your cake and have it too, so I opted to watch the film THIS year and review it THIS year because that would be a definite for-sure slam dunk, and the future, despite our best efforts, is always uncertain.  So Jenna Ortega carries over again from "Scream VI". 

I asked my wife if she wanted to join me, because nobody I work with has ever met my wife, so probably half of them are convinced that she might be fictional. But it turns out she has NEVER seen the original "Beetlejuice" film, so I guess there would be little point in taking her to see the sequel. Well, she could just WATCH the original, it must be streaming on one of the services we subscribe to.  But whatever, I invited my friend Victoria, who dressed up as Beetlejuice for the occasion. I appreciate the extra effort. 

But I can remember a time when movie studios put out their scariest movies in October, because of the Halloween hype, and then those films would disappear for a while and maybe get released one year later on DVD (then BluRay) to tie in with Halloween a second time.  Or maybe the film would premiere on premium cable or On Demand the next time that pumpkins were being carved and kids were trick-or-treating, right?  Now it's a whole new world thanks to streaming, and so movies like this are now released in theatres in September so they can be On Demand or streaming in October of the SAME YEAR.  Man, you kids today don't know how lucky you have things, when I was a teenager if you wanted to see a new movie you had to drive somewhere, either the theater or the Blockbuster Video, but you just get every movie you want on your phones, don't you?  Or you download them from a web torrent like it's not even a thing.  Even with a VHS rental, though, I was still too scared to rent most horror movies.  But I'm sure I have "Beetlejuice" somewhere on VHS or DVD, or both. 

THE PLOT: After a family tragedy, three generations of the Deetz family return home to Winter River. Still haunted by Beetlejuice, Lydia's life is turned upside-down when her teenage daughter, Astrid, accidentally opens the portal to the Afterlife. 

AFTER: Tim Burton is one of those directors who gets a free pass from me, in the same vein as George Lucas or Wes Anderson, and while I may not love everything these filmmakers put out, I WILL watch them and also champion their right to create whatever they want however they want to do it.  There's a history there, and it gets amplified when I realize that I have, either by accident or design, seen every Tim Burton-directed feature. "Big Eyes", "Dark Shadows", "Sleepy Hollow", "Ed Wood" and "Mars Attacks!"  My personal favorite at one time was "Big Fish" and I may have had some issues with him digressing from the source material when he made "Alice in Wonderland".  So there's one more reason to watch "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" now and not break the streak by leaving it unwatched. 

So if he decides that 36 is the right number of years to pass before putting out a sequel, then I'm not inclined to disagree.  It's his baby, he can do whatever he wants with it. And I think it's genius that the film is not called "Beetlejuice 2", because how boring is that?  Why not force everyone to say the name twice, and then they're all 2/3 of the way towards summoning the demon himself.  Is he a demon, though?  Or just a ghost?  Are there ghost/demons, as we kind of saw in "The Ring" and "Night House", or is this all just a case of screenwriters realizing that ghosts by themselves are not scary enough, being intangible and just trapped souls after all.  OK, none of it is for reals so we might as well say there are ghost/demons, and OK maybe there are vampire/werewolves or mummy/witches while we're at it.  Who cares? 

Lydia Deetz of course is an adult now, and the host of a supernatural talk show called "Ghost House", where she pretends to visit haunted houses and see ghosts.  (Really?  Not "Ghost of the Town" or "Ghost to Ghost" or "Talk Show Ghost"?  I got a million of 'em. "Saturday Evening Ghost"?).  But then she sees a hallucination of Beetlejuice, the ghost/demon who haunted her parents' house when she was a teen, who tried to make her his child bride.

Lydia and her daughter, Astrid, travel back to the old family home in Connecticut after the death of Lydia's father, Charles.  Charles was played by an actor in the original film who got cancelled years ago for sex offender charges, so killing off his character was necessary, and here in the sequel his character either appears in animated form, or without his head and part of his torso after death by shark attack.  Lydia's boyfriend/producer makes the bold move of proposing to her while on this funeral trip, for a Halloween wedding, and Astrid also meets a local boy who seems to have a similar disdain for the holiday, so they decide to spend it together. 

Charles (minus his head) turns up in an afterlife waiting room, as seen in the first film, and also in the afterlife we see that Beetlejuice has worked his way up to middle management, supervising a whole office of those shrunken-head ghosts who are all named Bob for some reason.  An dead actor and now ghost-detective, Wolf Jackson, informs Beetlejuice that his former wife has escaped her captivity (several separated boxes each containing a body part) and is now draining souls of the dead while searching for Beetlejuice himself.  So at some point we do get an origin story for Mr. Juice, who learned after marrying a very beautiful woman at the time of the Black Plague that she was a cult leader who poisoned him on their wedding night as part of her immortality ritual. However, when he realized he was dying he managed to cut her up into pieces as his final act. Well, that's romance for you. 

Astrid manages to figure out that her new boyfriend Jeremy is also a ghost, the big clue was that he never leaves that house or yard.  Jeremy says he needs her to travel with him to the afterlife to help him regain his life, and as a bonus she will be able to see her father's spirit.  Sure, what could POSSIBLY go wrong there?  But Lydia appears on the scene after they depart and figures out that Jeremy should not be trusted, and also by the way he may have killed his parents years ago, perhaps that's why he can't move on to the afterlife.  Lydia makes a deal to marry Beetlejuice if he'll bring her to the afterlife to save Astrid.  Meanwhile ghost detective Wolf Jackson learns that real people have somehow entered the afterlife, and he vows to put a stop to it.  

Jeremy's plan was to trade Astrid's life for his soul, so he could get a second chance at life.  He takes Astrid to the "Soul Train" which will take her to the Great Beyond, but her dead father's spirit sees her and knows she doesn't belong there, so he takes them to Saturn's moon, which is where those sandworms from the first film apparently live. And after condemning Jeremy to Hell, Astrid's father shows his wife and daughter how to get back from the Upside-Down.  Also meanwhile, Lydia's mother, Delia gets bitten by the snakes she rented for her husband's funeral, so she ends up down in the afterlife too.  Well, we're really killing off the legacy characters this week, aren't we?  

Finally there's a big showdown in the church during the planned Halloween wedding, but of course Beetlejuice shows up to claim Lydia for himself.  Well, she did sign a contract, and marriage is a contract.  But Beetlejuice's ex also finally catches up with him at the church, and so does Wolf Jackson. And who knew that the cake mentioned in the song "MacArthur Park" with its great green icing melting down was, in fact, a wedding cake?  I sure didn't.  The bad characters get eaten by a sandworm, the good characters move on with their lives, and Beetlejuice is returned to the diorama in the attic for another 36 years, when the next sequel gets released, and I can imagine what the title of that film is going to be.  

There's just a lot of scurrying around frantically in this film, and it seems like everyone who's in the afterlife is trying to get back to the living world, and then everyone in the living world either dies or is trying to get to the afterlife some other way.  So the plot is always firing in six directions at a time, and I wonder why nobody can learn to just be happy where they ARE, would that be too much to ask.  No, god damn it, I just HAVE to get to the afterlife somehow.  OK, now I desperately need to get back!  Make up your damn minds, please. 

Look, it makes some kind of sense, during our lives we keep wanting new things, we get bored with eating the same things over and over so we're always looking for better restaurants that serve new things.  You can't just watch the same 10 movies over and over again, even if they are your favorites, you end up always trying to find something better, and come on, the only real way to find stuff is volume, volume, volume.  New jobs, new friends, new experiences, we're all on a quest for more, and what if that doesn't end when we die?  

Honestly, we've been told for thousands of years what heaven is like, you get your wings and your white robe and you somehow know how to play the harp, and you get to see your dead relatives again, and, umm, that's it?  Man, that sounds like a very boring way to spend eternity.  Or you get thrown into the lake of hellfire and get punished for your sins and I suppose that's even worse.  But absolutely ZERO of the people who told you what the afterlife is like had ANY first-hand experience, think about that for a second, somebody just made a bunch of stuff up and everybody else believed it, which is just stupid. 

Perhaps there's nothing after we die, but according to this film, there is an afterlife, and you go to a giant administration building with never-ending corridors and incompetent staff and you spend a couple eons in a waiting room that never calls your number. Believable.  Then if you're lucky and you can work something out, maybe you get a job working in the building and become part of the incompetent staff, but at least you get a lot of breaks.  And then once you put in your 3,000 years or so processing the newbies you can retire and board the Soul Train and finally move on to some kind of more positive restful experience. I'm surprisingly OK with this scenario. 

The film is still a lot of fun, and when you consider that I just watched four slasher films, fun is really what I'm missing right now - essentially this is like a live-action cartoon, and it doesn't take itself too serioulsy.  Unfortunately I think I'm back to form on scary movies full of gore tomorrow. 

Also starring Michael Keaton (last seen in "The Flash"), Winona Ryder (last seen in "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee"), Catherine O'Hara (last seen in "A.C.O.D."), Justin Theroux (last heard in "Lady and the Tramp" (2019)), Willem Dafoe (last seen in "Asteroid City"), Monica Bellucci (last seen in "Mafia Mamma"), Arthur Conti, Nick Kellington (last seen in "First Kill"), Santiago Cabrera (last seen in "What Happened to Monday"), Burn Gorman (last seen in "Lift"), Danny DeVito (last heard in "Migration"), Sami Slimane, Amy Nuttall, Mark Heenehan, Liv Spencer, Skylar Park, Matt Lyons, Jane Leaney (last seen in "Dolittle"), David Ayres, Sophie Holland (last seen in "Tom & Jerry"), Walles Hamonde (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"), Rebecca O'Mara, Adam Speers, Daryl Kwan, Caroline Lawrie, Philip Philmar (last seen in "No Time to Die"), Stephen K. Amos, Sean Verre, Noah Mendes, Juliana Yazbeck (last seen in "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit"), Bea Svistunenko, Filipe Cates, Alex Michael Stoll, Rupi Lai, Georgina Beedle, Stefano Marchetti, James Fisher, Olivia Valentine, Gianni Calchetti, Chloe Driver and the voice of Charlie Hopkinton.

RATING: 7 out of 10 tiny houses in the attic diorama