I’ll Never Have That Recipe Again

My thoughts on Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice

On the first weekend of April, 1988, two new movies of note had just opened—a weird-looking horror comedy from the guy who made the delightfully goofy Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and the heavily-hyped screen adaptation of what was at the time being referred to as the novel of my generation that featured all the things a pretentious teen might want to find in a film, such as cocaine, fact checkers, hip soundtracks and Dianne Wiest. Naturally, I set off to the local multiplex with some acquaintances, sat down in the little auditorium and proceeded to bask in the glory that was Bright Lights, Big City. In my defense, I seem to recall that one of the other people in our party was a girl I was always inexplicably trying (and inevitably failing) to impress and she had no particular interest in seeing that other film at all. To be fair, the film wasn’t that bad—it was made with a certain sense of style, contained some good performances and was about as good of a film that could have possibly been made from what I can assure you in hindsight was most certainly not the literary masterpiece some at the time claimed it to be—but was more or less fatally undone by the casting of Michael J. Fox, then riding high on such hits as Family Ties, Back to the Future and The Secret of My Success, in the central role of a Yuppie drug addict who learns to wake up and smell the overly symbolic bread at the end.

Upon returning to school, other acquaintances who had chosen differently assured me that the competing movie, which I am assuming that you have figured out by now was Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, was one that was right up my particular alley and that I would probably also get a serious kick out of the relatively unknown teen actress who played one of the key roles, an up-and-comer by the name of Winona Ryder. When the next weekend rolled around, I went out to catch up with that one and had an absolute blast with it. Although the plot was ramshackle enough to make a Ritz Brothers film look like a model of narrative cohesion by comparison and the energy tended to sap a little whenever it focused on the nice, normal and newly deceased couple at its center (played by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis), it had a cheerfully anarchic sense of humor that even then was becoming increasingly rare in studio comedies, a delightfully outlandish visual style that suggested what a live-action version of the freakier cartoon visions of Max Fleischer might look like and a knockout performance from Ryder, who instantly achieved teen icon status as angsty teen Lydia Deetz. Best of all, there was the equally memorable performance from Michael Keaton in the title role, in which he served as essentially the equivalent of John Belushi’s Bluto in Animal House—he wasn’t in it nearly as much as one remembers but made such an impact in his scenes as the grotesquely manic poltergeist that you still felt his presence even when he wasn’t on the screen. Astonishingly, despite (or possibly because of) all the weirdness on display, the movie defied the odds and became a big hit and supercharged the careers of most everyone involved before eventually resting on its laurels as a perennial cult classic.

In the 36 years since it came out, I have seen Beetlejuice more times that I can remember and still adore it and marvel at how a vision so strange made it through a studio system process that was designed to ensure that such things did not get through in the first place. That said, I must confess that the idea of making a sequel to it never appealed to me that much. After all, one of the best things about it was the sheer novelty of it all, the kind that it still managed to retain to some degree even after multiple viewings, and that characteristic would, almost by definition, be lost in any attempt to make this particularly strange bolt of lightning strike a second time. Besides, most attempts at making sequels to comedies tend to falter as well because most of the jokes inevitably wind up being rehashes of the ones that worked the first time around, only bigger and broader in terms of the presentation. Nevertheless, untold man-hours over the last couple of decades have been consumed by trying to figure out a way to come up with a follow-up (including one that actually got written entitled Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian) and now, with films like Top Gun: Maverick having proven the commercial viability of so-called legacy sequels, we at long last have Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, a continuation that brings back a number of the original’s key participants, including Burton, Keaton, Ryder and Catherine O’Hara, to participate in the zaniness. What it doesn’t bring along is the sense of wild and unique spirit of fun that helped to make the first film so entertaining, instead preferring to go the empty nostalgia route with a film that has its moments here and there but which is so consumed with supplying callbacks to the stuff that people liked the first time around that it never quite gets around to coming up with anything new and ingenious enough to spark the kind of giddy, goofy thrills that the original had in abundance.

As the film begins, Lydia (Ryder) is not at a particularly great point in her life—she has channeled her paranormal abilities into hosting a cheesy cable show produced by her unctuous boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux), she is estranged from teenaged daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega), a budding activist who resents the fact that the only ghost that her mother apparently cannot see is that of her late father, an environmentalist who disappeared during a trip in the Amazon and has recently been haunted by visions of Beetlejuice (Keaton), who marital clutches she only barely escaped from all those years ago. To add to the grimness, Lydia is informed by stepmother Delia (O’Hara) that her father, Charles, has just died—a move seemingly inspired less by dramatic necessity and more by the fact that bringing Jeffrey Jones back would be deemed an untenable move by most viewers—causing her and Astrid to return to the bucolic town of Winter River for the funeral and to clear out the funky old house where they used to live in order to prepare it for sale.

Already in a state of perpetual aggravation regarding her mother, Astrid gets upset when the slimy Rory uses the post-funeral reception to propose that he and Lydia get married in two days (Halloween, naturally), which she is goaded into accepting. After storming off on her bike, she comes across Jeremy (Arthur Conti), a cute-yet-sensitive boy who almost instantly seems to get her and who is harboring a secret that will not exactly come as a shock to too many viewers. This leads to Astrid making a dumb decision that sends her on a potentially permanent trip to the afterworld and forces Lydia to do the unthinkable and contact Beetlejuice, now a major cog in the mechanics of the afterlife bureaucracy, to beg for his help in rescuing her, even agreeing to actually marry him at last in exchange. Meanwhile, the first Mrs. Beetlejuice, soul-sucking femme fatale (emphasis on the fatale) Delores (Monica Bellucci), has been unexpectedly revived and, after putting herself back together again, goes off in search of her beloved, wreaking havoc among the undead along the way.

Even this cursory recap of the basic plot of Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice (and I see I haven’t even mentioned the presence of Willem Dafoe as a vainglorious actor whose work starring in a police movie franchise while alive has led him to become a top cop in the afterlife) suggests one of the key flaws of the film—there just isn’t much of a story to be had in the screenplay cooked up by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar and Seth Grahame-Smith. Granted, the original film was not exactly celebrated for its strong dramatic structure but it did have a recognizable narrative spine running through it, even if the film would divert away from it at the drop of a body part for anything from a weird visual joke to a full-scale musical number. This time around, there are any number of plot threads and elaborate set pieces twirling around—arguably too many—but the basic narrative is so thin that it would require additional padding to work as an episode of the old Beetlejuice animated series and doesn’t really differentiate itself that much from its predecessor (once again, it climaxes with a wedding ceremony that gets wildly out of hand). The story also suffers a bit from the fact that pretty much every single character in it is an oddball in some way, which becomes a little exhausting after a while. Sure, the characters played in the original by Baldwin and Davis were a little boring compared to everyone else but having a couple of relatively straight-laced characters amidst the insanity was a necessary component towards achieving that film’s delicate tone and kept it from being just a big-screen joke book. Here, everyone is some kind of colorful oddball (even the ostensibly normal character played by Ortega has her share of quirks long before the craziness touches her) and the effect is like getting a box of Cracker Jacks that is nothing but prizes—momentarily diverting, of course, but not especially satisfying.

The other major problem with Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice is one that has plagued many of the so-called legacy sequels of late—it spends too much time rehashing things from the past and not enough time coming up with new stuff. If there was a particular joke that you enjoyed in Beetlejuice, there is an excellent chance that you will be seeing it again here, presented in a manner that is bigger, if not exactly better. This time around, however, the anarchic glee that accompanied the wildest bits the first time around has been replace by a sense of duty, as though Burton was afraid of possibly alienating audiences as he did with Batman Returns by not simply giving them more of the same. Take the classic moment in the original where the participants at an artsy-fartsy dinner party were suddenly possessed by Harry Belafonte’s “The Banana Boat Song.” That was a scene that worked not just because it was weird and funny (though it was in both cases) but because of the sheer surprise of it all—watching it for the first time, you practically had to rub your eyes to ensure that you really were seeing what you thought you were seeing. Inevitably, the film reprises that gag here—with the song this time around being Richard Harris’s infamous rendition of “MacArthur Park”—and while it is staged in a far more elaborate manner than before, it isn’t nearly as funny or as memorable because the main sensation one gets from it is a sense of obligation, like a singer who has grown sick of their biggest hit but knows that they have to crank it out again to keep the audiences happy.

And yet, as uneven, messy and beholden to its past as Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice is, it does have some virtues going for it. For starters, there is the obvious sense of energetic glee that Burton brings to the proceedings that was largely absent in such lesser recent efforts as Alice in Wonderland, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and his truly revolting live-action remake of Dumbo—in revisiting the peculiar world of one of his first big hits, he seems to be having fun behind the camera in a long time. It is also fun to see Keaton, Ryder and O’Hara return to their beloved roles as well—wisely, the film resists the urge to increase Keaton’s screen time this time around. As the newcomer to the group, Ortega proves to be an inspired addition to the group, even if her character doesn’t really have that much to do in the end. Likewise, although the film tends to forget about her for long stretches of time, Monica Bellucci makes a striking impression as Beetlejuice’s one-time bride (for whom “til death do us part” is more of a suggestion than a rule) who seems to have drifted in straight from perhaps the greatest movie that the late Italian horror maestro Mario Bava never actually made. There are also a number of funny moments here and there as well as an especially inspired deployment of one of the key cues from Pino Donaggio’s score from the original Carrie. If nothing else, as far as legacy sequels go, I definitely prefer it to the likes of Top Gun: Maverick and Twisters.

Of course, in those cases, I didn’t especially care for the originals either. Beetlejuice, on the other hand, is one that I have always loved and Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, despite its momentary pleasures, cannot help but come up considerably short by comparison. That original film was a work of crackpot inspiration that at times felt like it had been made by kids who snuck into the studio after hours when no one was watching and which gleefully hocked metaphorical loogies at what one might expect to find in a major studio production at that time. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, on the other hand, feels more like an institution (one solidly respectable enough to inspire promotional tie-ins pushing everything from deodorants to insurance to plates of glop at Denny’s) and less like something that escaped from one. Fans of the original will no doubt clamor to see it and may even like it to some degree but my guess is that it will never find a place in their hearts in the way that Beetlejuice did. Watching this film is like going through the world’s most elaborate haunted house exhibit two times in a row—it is the same thing as before but it cannot help but seem a lot less impressive the second time around.