In 1988, a man in stripy trousers cemented two Hollywood careers. With Beetlejuice, Michael Keaton’s rascally green-haired “bio-exorcist” helped to establish the whimsical goth aesthetic and zany sense of humour that would become director Tim Burton’s brand. The film also launched Winona Ryder, who played the “strange and unusual” Lydia Deetz, a spiky-fringed teenager who communed with the dead. In the years since, Ryder has cashed in on her status as the high priestess of goth Gen-Xers, in supernatural films and shows such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Lost Souls and Netflix’s Stranger Things. In Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the sequel, her character has cashed in, too.
The adult Lydia is a “psychic mediator” who lives in New York and fronts a TV show called Ghost House. She’s dating her producer, a hippie bore called Rory (a very funny Justin Theroux), to the chagrin of her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega). “Cut the New Age emotional trauma bonding shit,” she says with a withering stare. When Lydia’s father dies, the gang – including her mother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara) – returns to the sleepy Winter River in Connecticut to clear out the once-haunted family house.
It’s nice to see Burton tackling his own lore after two decades spent mostly adapting others’ work. Films such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dark Shadows, Alice in Wonderland and his best-forgotten Dumbo saw the director apply his macabre spin with increasingly lacklustre results. On the other hand, a sequel that arrives 36 years later does not exactly scream “urgent”.
The set-up is low stakes enough. In the underworld, Beetlejuice is being hounded by a “soul-sucking death-cult leader” named Delores (Monica Bellucci), who happens to be his ex-wife. Beetlejuice himself is after Lydia, who, above ground, keeps glimpsing the demon that haunted her all those years ago. Worse still, Rory has proposed – and the wedding is to take place in just two days, on Lydia’s favourite holiday, Halloween.
Keaton slips back into his trusty striped suit with ease, comfortably locking in to the character’s droll, hyperactive patter. Ryder’s performance also summons teenage Deetz’s spirit, reanimating the character with distracted, dreamy energy, while the cool-headed Ortega serves as a grounding foil.
The film reunites Burton with several of his regular collaborators, including the composer Danny Elfman and costume designer Colleen Atwood. The narrative scaffolding provided by screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (the duo behind Netflix’s Wednesday, which also stars Ortega), however, feels laboured. What stood out about the original Beetlejuice was its surrealist underworld, a hellishly bureaucratic waiting room populated by an inventive variety of corpses. The new film spends too long over-enunciating each character’s reason for journeying there. Burton struggles to balance the film’s convoluted, competing threads, including Lydia’s upcoming nuptials, Astrid’s romance with a mysterious local boy (newcomer Arthur Conti), Delores’ pursuit of Beetlejuice, and Beetlejuice’s pursuit of Lydia. Things are more fun once everyone’s on Beetlejuice’s turf (there’s a literal soul train, a cute touch). But it’s a slog to get there.
Bellucci, Burton’s latest real-life, raven-haired muse, has scant work to do. The actress mainly stomps around stupefying everyone with her terrible, fearsome beauty, and leaving her shrunken victims looking as though they’ve been vacuum-packed.
There are bright spots: slippery green guts and a creepy, Chucky-style doll are executed by way of handmade practical effects, while flashbacks are delivered silent-movie style, in black and white, and via stop-motion animation. The updated Delia, one of Beetlejuice’s most flamboyant and bitterly funny creations, has traded her Eighties avant-garde sculpture for 21st-century performance art, decorating the Deetz house in a black lacy “mourning shroud”, and Theroux appears to be having a hoot.
The film is safe and perfectly serviceable. In Beetlejuice, a scene in which a possessed Delia performs a dance routine to Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” in the middle of a dinner party turned the film into a cult classic. Anticipating audiences will want more of the same, Burton re-stages this, setting the dance to a different (equally incongruous) song. This time, however, the scene feels awkward and forced. It’s revealing that Burton has bothered to resurrect this ancient material. Like Lydia, the director has cashed in on his past.
“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is in cinemas now
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