Beetlejuice Beetlejuice review - a lively resurrection

Sometimes love never dies and the dead never rot. A lot of water has flowed down the River Styx since Tim Burton’s first Beetlejuice film in 1988, but the bones of the original have held up surprisingly well, the madcap morbid spoof outliving many of its peers from the “high concept” era.

And this absurdly delayed sequel from Burton shows how well the director’s funny bones still click together, as do those of the actors Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder, back in harness here – their careers, like Burton’s, revivified in recent years after mid-career dips.

Lydia Deetz, Ryder’s ghost-addled youngster from the first film, has in 2024 grown into a pill-addled mom and host of a TV show that probes “haunted houses” for a gullible public. On hearing of the death of her father (in the jaws of a shark), she returns to the family’s old spook-filled house where her one-time admirer still lurks – Keaton’s ghoul named Beetlejuice, very much not to be summoned from the afterlife with a triple name-check.

Accompanying Lydia, to spend an improbable length of time sorting out family affairs, are her stepmother (Catherine O’Hara) and mega-disgruntled teen daughter, played by Jenna Ortega, whose own dad has lately snuffed it in the Amazon. (Geena Davis, Alec Baldwin and Jeffrey Jones from the original film are omitted, the latter two actors beset by legal troubles.)

Ryder and Ortega are stars of Stranger Things and Wednesday, two Netflix shows that pledge deep allegiance to 1980s freaky movies, so Ortega fits right in here, with eyes that seem wide and gothically hooded at the same time. Deadpan comedy legend O’Hara is the third main revenant from the first Beetlejuice, another addled mom tasked with also being a caustic, hippy-dippy performance artist who playacts the death of Cleopatra. Faced with this character cocktail, O’Hara has a tougher time coming into focus.

Such multi-tasking comes more naturally to the deceased. The debauched Keaton, unofficial king of the blood-spouting, the impaled and the trepanned, resembles Barry Humphries’ Sir Les Patterson were he to have been recently electrocuted. Also prominent in his grubby, expressionist netherworld are Willem Dafoe as a corpse-cop and a stapled-together Monica Bellucci with a worrying oral fixation on Beetlejuice. A supporting cast of the walk-on dead spend much of their time, for some reason, pen-pushing and passport-stamping. Hardly any of them seem to have been deleted from the land of the living by natural causes.

The story is driven by people romantically pursuing Ortega and Ryder – the latter has both Keaton and, on this side of the grave, a mortally smarmy TV producer (Justin Theroux) intent on taking her up the aisle. But love, in Tim Burton-land, rarely conquers anything. Wrecked relationships, broken families, mid-life crises and dead fathers jovially haunt everyone.

As a sequel rather than a reboot, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is not immune from the mothball symptoms of “sequelitis” – trying a bit too hard to reprise an original without the freshness of Episode 1. In the first film, Beetlejuice famously declared: “I attended Juilliard. I’m a graduate of the Harvard Business School. I travel quite extensively. I lived through the Black Plague and had a pretty good time during that. I’ve seen The Exorcist about 167 times and it keeps getting funnier every single time I see it.” The screenplay here doesn’t snicker-snack quite so well, and Keaton – whose frantic turn in the original seemed to anticipate Jim Carrey – gives us a more measured swivel-eyed sociopath. 

Burton’s gift for jolts and visual coups may be in mild decline, and now and then there are looks of astonishment from characters that he doesn’t cut around fast enough. Old props and tropes make a comeback, among them the amusing Handbook for the Recently Deceased. Spectrally possessed characters once more mime an eccentric pop song and dance badly to it, a gag that’s said to be a fan favourite. In the first film, it was “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” around a dinner table; less successfully here it’s “MacArthur Park” around an altar. (“Day-O” also reappears.)

As with many sequels, getting the old gang together again feels as though 20 per cent of it is for the benefit of the old gang. But it’s an enjoyable homecoming nonetheless. With Johnny Depp’s career clambering back to its questionable feet, and Burton getting the bug for shock-haired follow-ups, can Edward Scissorhands Edward Scissorhands be far behind?

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