Film SPOILER Review: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Film SPOILER Review: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Synopsis and commentary for the sequel to the 1988 movie, Beetlejuice.
I LOVE the original Beetlejuice movie. Back when I was young, we had recorded it (on VHS) from the local channels, so we had commercials scattered throughout the film. One day I stayed home from school sick and watched it back to back six times. I’ve watched that VHS so many times that not only can I quote the movie, but I also remember each scene where there was a commercial break.
So, to say I was excited for the sequel is an understatement!
Directed by Tim Burton.
Music by Danny Elfman (my favorite front man from Oingo Boingo)
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.
Please do NOT read ahead if you don’t want spoilers— you have been warned! :)Beetlejuice part deux is a fun response to the original. While schlocky in a lot of parts, I find the world building to be unique and nostalgic to where I can be pretty forgiving.
If you are a fan of the original, you will immediately notice the similarity of the intro credits, where the infamous Beetlejuice theme by Danny Elfman plays over fading actor names while traveling through the town model. The song has been jazzed up a bit, but stays very true to the song we all know and love.
We’re introduced to Lydia Deetz as an adult working as a medium of sorts on a TV show. She’s dressed similarly to Elvira (in my opinion), so it gives a lot of those vibes. She’s interrupted by a vision of Beetlejuice in the crowd and a frantic series of texts from her step-mother, Delia Deetz.
She leaves her show to meet with Delia at her art gallery (apparently she has made it as an “artist”) to learn that her father has died.
As a side note, I find this part funny because the actor who played Charles Deetz in the original film is Jeffrey Jones, who’s been convicted of …things. So they did everything in their power to use his likeness while not having him actually in the sequel. His story is told via claymation animation, and his corpse is missing its top half. So, funny workaround!
Anyway, we learn Lydia has a daughter who barely talks to her. However, she finds a way to let her know that her grandfather passed, and they all return to the original home in Winter River from the first movie to have his funeral.
Jenna Ortega plays Lydia’s daughter, Astrid, and is just as angsty as Lydia was in the original. Delia points this out to Lydia a lot, ribbing her for giving Delia such a hard time when she was young (I liked this little detail). As a side note, I did really like Jenna Ortega in this role - she makes facial expressions that are so uniquely her, but also fit well with her character.
I won’t get all the details in order, just FYI.
We get a scene of the underworld where a dead janitor cleans up. This is a funny cameo by Danny DeVito. He knocks over a bunch of boxes containing the parts of Monica Bellucci’s character, Dolores, that come to life and proceed to staple her together to a disco tune. We learn she is a soul sucker, taking out the janitor’s soul (a’la The True Knot in Doctor Sleep). She drops his rubbery husk and goes on her mission to find Beetlejuice.
Back in Winter River, Lydia’s manager, Rory (played by Justin Theroux), tags along and finds her in the attic where the model of the town still sat. She finds a Beetlejuice flyer and her phone goes crazy with Beetlejuice ads. Rory challenges her story about Beetlejuice and calls his name 3 times.
They’re transported to the model and fall into “couple’s therapy” with the man himself.
Definitely pleased to see Lydia, Beetlejuice performs his usual gross scare tactics, with one particularly nasty scene of Lydia rapidly growing pregnant with a demon Beetlejuice baby bursting from her belly. After having enough of his shenanigans, she calls out, “Home! Home! Home!” similar to the way Barbara did in the first movie. It transports them back into the living world.
Rory shrugs the whole thing off as a dream. Meanwhile, Willem Dafoe plays Wolf Jackson, a former movie star who had a mishap with a real grenade. He’s the detective on the case, following Dolores’ path of soul sucking destruction. This puts Beetlejuice on his radar.
Honestly, the sub-plot with Dolores and Wolf Jackson could be removed and the story would stay the same. I’m not going to comment much on their parts.
But, Dolores was Beetlejuice’s ex-wife, who poisoned him during the honeymoon. Before he succumbed to the poison, he chopped her up.
The funeral for Charles commences, and Rory “tactfully” proposes to Lydia, putting her on the spot. She reluctantly agrees, which sends Astrid off and away to bike through town. She gets into an accident and runs into the treehouse of a boy named Jeremy.
Astrid and Jeremy hit it off and he invites her to hang out with him before Lydia’s wedding on Halloween. She goes to be with Jeremy and as they kiss, Astrid sees that they’re floating and freaks out. Surprise! Jeremy is a ghost, and tells her that he broke his neck when he fell from his treehouse. (there were a few hints here: he happened to have a Handbook for the Recently Deceased, and his parents were acting weird).
Jeremy convinces Astrid to go to the other side with him to help him come back to life. As all this is happening, Lydia learns from the realtor, Jane (daughter of Jane the first from the original), that Jeremy’s house won’t sell because he murdered his parents and he died trying to escape the law. Lydia races to save Astrid while she and Jeremy create the door to the otherworld and knock three times. Lydia gets there in time to see the door slam shut—and this is where she enlists the help of Beetlejuice to get her daughter back.
Lydia learns that Astrid recited an incantation that would actually swap her life for Jeremy’s, and she’s hauled off to a “customs” sort of area. As they’re dragging Astrid off to the soul train, Lydia finds and saves her. They also run into Lydia’s dead husband, Richard. While all this is happening, Delia dies from asp bites to the neck in some weird ritual to honor Charles. She also calls on Beetlejuice in the afterlife to help her.
Delia finds Charles and they board the soul train together and move on.
Richard and Charles’ death costumes were my favorite: Richard was being eaten by piranhas, and Charles was half eaten by a shark—his organs were constantly spurting.
Beetlejuice does as promised and gets rid of Jeremy, sending him to hell. Then, he collects on Lydia’s promise and forces her to marry him… again!
There’s an interesting musical scene here reminiscent of the dinner scene in the original, where Beetlejuice forces everyone to sing and dance while they have confused expressions on their faces. Dolores crashes the wedding, but Astrid still has the death handbook and finds a way to draw a door to sandworm territory.
A sandworm bursts out and Beetlejuice corrals it like a bull, where it chomps down on Dolores and Rory, taking them to Jupiter’s moon. I’m not entirely sure how Lydia did this, but she was able to explode Beetlejuice by saying his name three times.
The film then goes through a series of events set to background songs where they visit Dracula’s castle, Astrid falls in love, gets married, then is in a birthing room where Lydia is close by. As Astrid is about to give birth, the same weird demon baby pops out and kills the doctors while crawling onto Astrid’s belly saying, “Mommy!”
Lydia wakes from the dream and Beetlejuice rises from the bed to say, “I just had a weird dream.” Lydia wakes again to an empty bed.
The ending confused me because I’m left to wonder if any of it happened. Or, did just the freaky birth not happen?
While I have a lot of questions, I’m not too concerned about it. I had fun seeing Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, and Catherine O’Hara back at it. Jenna Ortega was a nice addition, and Justin Theroux’s character was one you loved to hate.
Michael Keaton really stole the show, with Jenna Ortega and Willem Dafoe not far behind. I know I didn’t talk about Dafoe much, but I did like his character, just not his story.
One gripe I had was that in the original, Beetlejuice gave Lydia a ring from a severed finger, which I thought was what they were doing with Dolores’ character. I think it was, but I wasn’t a big fan of her backstory. I found the whole “soul-sucking” thing not really fitting with the world. There were no other soul-suckers, even though it was implied she was part of a cult.
Other than that, I had fun. Was it as good as the original? No I don’t think so. But in a cinematic world that is largely bereft of creativity, it’s nice to revisit the strange and unusual in a way that doesn’t disgrace the original.
Beetlejuice
Beetlejuice
Beetlejuice
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