Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

After thirty-six years, someone says Beetlejuice's name three times again, and the mischievous demon returns to unleash his familiar brand of “mayhem.”

I meant to watch this movie months ago, but I didn’t get around to it. I think maybe rewatching the original film and seeing it with fresh eyes kind of killed my enthusiasm. Not that the original is bad necessarily, it’s just… not as good as I remembered. Besides just being generally gross and insensitive in that ignorant, but surprisingly mean way that was so common in the '80s, the film was a lot more rapey than I remembered. Whether it was just a general air of sexual assault, or the fact Lydia was definitely a child, and Beetlejuice definitely intended to fuck her, it‘s just one of those films where you watch it now and go… wow, the 1980s really were way more casually rapey than I ever realized at the time. So going back in, I really hoped that the intervening years had toned that shit down quite a bit.

But still... while hope burns eternal, I definitely expected this to be a problem.

This is partially because, one of the lesser reasons why the world continues to get worse is due to a rotating cast of famous (mostly white) male directors, actors, comedians, creators of whatever, who have been famous since, oh… let’s say the 1980s… due to whatever beloved art of the time that they created, e.g. Beetlejuice—which again... surprisingly rapey—who have apparently decided, as they’ve grown older, to not become more sensitive, to not be more open to self-examination, to not look for new experiences, and to not expand their worldview at all, opting instead to become more myopic when it comes to their regressive beliefs, more stubbornly intransigent in their ways, and much, much more of an asshole when it comes to letting the world know this.

So, being how likely it is that, due to his age, wealth, and fame, all built off of art that is more than a bit problematic now in hindsite, that Tim Burton could be one of these guys, I assumed this film would be nothing but "old man shouts at clouds" bullshit. Maybe Beetlejuice gets canceled, or maybe there's an on-going gag about pronouns, or maybe the blue-haired kids are screeching about something, or who knows... whatever stupid shit old white guys complain about when they're feeling like the world isn't being their oyster and their oyster alone.

It's a fair concern these days. I mean, just spend a little time perusing the work of famous older male standup comedians, especially the ones who go on bigot-fest bullshit like Joe Rogan, and you’ll find that their "comedy" is now mostly a lot of whiny victim man-baby grievance screeds, mostly because they‘re not allowed to say slurs “ironically” anymore.

So, I was worried about that… who is Tim Burton now?

Besides all that, I was specifically concerned because of Jeffrey Jones. Jones is famous for being the Principal in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, as well as for playing Lydia’s father, Charles Deetz, in the original Beetlejuice. He is also famous for being charged with soliciting a minor to pose for nude photographs in 2002, which happened multiple times, and reportedly included cowboy and Native American themed props. Jones plead no contest to the charges, and has since then had two subsequent arrests for failing to update his sex offender status.

So, another fair question, what was the film gonna do about that shit?

The good news is, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the film wasn’t as insensitive or rapey as I feared it might be, with very little old white man whining too. Also Jones wasn’t in the film at all. In fact, almost immediately, his character is killed off in a claymation sequence where a shark bites his head off. After that, his character is portrayed as a headless ghost who never speaks. Jones never truly appears or speaks in the film. So that was all pretty nice to see.

But as for the rest of the movie? …Meh.

So, anyway...

It’s 2024, and still-committed-to-the-bit aging goth girl, Lydia Deetz, hosts a paranormal talk show called Ghost House. An anxiety-riddled pill head, she has been estranged from her daughter, Astrid, ever since her husband, and Astrid's father, Richard, died while in the Amazon. Astrid is sad and gothy herself, and also refuses to believe her mother can see ghosts, because for some reason, Lydia has never seen Richard's ghost. Astrid also can’t stand Rory, Lydia’s creepy boyfriend and producer, and she's not wrong about that, because he sucks. And that’s how their lives are now.

But then, while taping the latest episode of her show, Lydia catches a quick glimpse of Beetlejuice in the live studio audience, and this rattles her. While Lydia is recovering from the shock off-stage, her stepmother, Delia, calls and informs her that her father, and Delia’s husband, Charles, has been killed by a shark. Lydia and Astrid travel to Winter River, Connecticut, for Charles' funeral. It’s the same town and the same house on the hill from the first film, but Barbara and Adam Maitland are no longer haunting it anymore. They’ve “moved on” in an unexplained way. At the wake, Rory pressures Lydia to marry him on Halloween, which is in a few days, and because everyone is watching them, Lydia hesitantly agrees.

Meanwhile, Astrid meets a local boy named Jeremy Frazier, who invites her to spend Halloween with him. Also meanwhile, in the Netherworld, Beetlejuice is now managing an afterlife call center, staffed by shrunken-headed employees, for ghosts who are in need of help dealing with the living people they’re haunting. He still pines for Lydia, and has been stalking her for the last 30 years. That‘s when dead actor/undead detective Wolf Jackson informs Beetlejuice that his ex-wife, the occultist Delores LaFerve—who he met during the Black Plague, where they both fell in love with each other and then murdered each other—has escaped from the prison Beetlejuice had put her in, and is now on a ghost-killing spree, draining the souls of the dead, while looking for him.

Back in the world of the living, Astrid realizes she has inherited her mother's psychic abilities and discovers Jeremy is a ghost. He persuades her to accompany him to the Netherworld so that she can see her father, but it’s trick, because he’s actually the ghost of murderous teen, and he wants Astrid to give him her soul so he can live again, which is apparently something that can be done. Astrid has no idea, so she and Jeremy enter the Netherworld. Lydia learns about Jeremy a little too late from the Real Estate Lady from the first movie, and with no other way to get to Astrid, she reluctantly summons Beetlejuice for help. She agrees to marry Beetlejuice, if he takes her to the Netherworld and helps her to save Astrid. When Wolf Jackson discovers Beetlejuice has brought a living person into the afterlife, he sends a bunch of dead cops after Beetlejuice and Lydia, just to add a dash of Benny Hill-ness to all the Third Act goings-on.

Will they all save Astrid? Will they all get closure? Will both of Lydia’s shitty boyfriends, Rory and Beetlejuice, get the boot? Will Astrid’s shitty boyfriend, Jeremy, also get the boot? Will the now randomly dead Delia get reunited in the afterlife with the also dead Charles? Will Delores be stopped before she can do whatever it was that her goal was? Will everything else that was also a part of this film get resolved in some way?

Spoiler: Yes.

Long stuck in development hell, for reasons that quickly become obvious, where for a while it existed as Beetlejuice goes to Hawaii, this is one of those films where it feels kind of stupid to say: “This movie was dumb, and dull, and also had nothing to say,” because duh, right? But still... it‘s so so true.

Dumb. Dull. Nothing to say.

Weirdly, after watching the film, I think the only reason that they finally settled on an idea at all is simply because they wanted to kill off Jeffrey Jones’ character, as that’s the film’s inciting incident. I don’t blame them for that, but that idea makes me wonder, was the original idea for this film just going to be a rehash of the plot from Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners? Because that seemed to be what was going on with Lydia’s Ghost House show.

Who knows.

The problem with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is there’s just too much going on here, and not enough focus on any of it… Lydia, Astrid, Delia, Beetlejuice, Richard, Rory, Charles, Jeremy Frazier, Detective Wolf Jackson, Delores LaFerve. Each one has their own storyline, and they all interact and intertwine with one another, and they all come together in the end, but it’s all too shallow, too broad, or rushed past, or just never leads anywhere. Plus, it's obvious that the only reason Jenna Ortega is in this is because she’s Wednesday Addams, so “because goth reasons,“ making this whole thing just a longer version of the joke pairing of her and Aubrey Plaza presenting at the SAG Awards in 2023.

And because it's so overstuffed with characters and their storylines, things just don't get rersolved. Remember the thing in the beginning about Lydia taking pills? The film didn’t. Or what about Delores and her vengeance quest? After not having an active role during most of the movie, it's brought to a sudden end in the climax almost like the filmmakers had forgotten about it until the last moment. Instead of building/resolving these storylines, they instead glom onto nostalgic callbacks, like the guy with the shrunken head guy who briefly appeared in the first movie. They loved that shit.

This is what occupies the film's first hour–the first hour of an hour and forty-four minute movie–before it finally brings together all the story threads that takes place in the world of the living, and the ones that takes place in the world of the dead. At that point, it's like the film realizes it's half over and shifts into high gear, bombing headlong down hill as it tries to tie all these threads together into a full story, only for it all to end up in a big knotted tangle of random, unearned nonsense.

But the weirdest part of all? Tim Burton films taking place on Halloween are like Shane Black films taking place on Christmas, right? And yet, the fact that this film takes place on Halloween turned out to be a barely acknowledged detail. And that’s indicative of the whole thing really, for a film that looks like a freshly-painted Beetlejuice-themed Disneyland ride, at its heart, it all felt colorless.

That was my main takeaway… Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is overcrowded and surface level. It's rote and by-the-numbers. Most of all, it's uninspired. It's like Tim Burton half-heartedly replaying his greatest hits, the cinematic version of an old rock band doing a tour of State Fairs. In short, it's a sloppy, half-baked, overstuffed mess that doesn’t hold together. If you ordered a Calzone and this is what you got, you'd want your money back.

Also, maybe this was just me...

But it’s weird that Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin didn’t return for this movie, especially because the first film is pretty much all about them. It’s a hole the film tries to ignore, and only succeeds in making it more obvious. Sure, sure, if they had returned, it would’ve only made this already overcrowded film more crowded, not to mention the fact that they’d have to explain how a pair of ghosts are now old as shit, but still… it’s disappointing to realize we‘ll never get to learn if Barbara really was the Kwisatz Haderach or not, and if she wasn’t, how did she manage to tame the fearsome Sand Worms of Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

I will say that I still liked Tim Burton’s vision of hell, with its glacially-paced labyrinth of bureaucracies, and the eternities of office work drudgery that await the Damned. That still resonates, but sadly, it’s not a focus of the film at all. Although, that’s one more problem, right? What is this film about? Why was it even made? Who’s it for? What’s the point? Obviously it’s a cash-grab, a blatant capitalization on an unused IP that was just sitting there, simply because it was just sitting there. And yes, I know it's not the only film out there that’s a pure cash-grab, but still… is it too much to ask that they at least try to make it less obvious?

In this case, yes. Yes, it apparently is.

Proof that you can never truly go home again, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice wasn’t a film that I was actually invested in being good or bad, and yet, once I saw it, I was still somehow disappointed.

Don’t bother, if you haven’t watched it already.