It had been a great many years since I watched Beetlejuice, the early Tim Burton film that helped skyrocket his career (it was a year before Burton and Michael Keaton made Batman, and two years before Edward Scissorhands, when Burton started his collaborative streak with Johnny Depp).

Not counting the advertisement-infested versions one dismissively half-watches on television, I remember just enough of the original to know that it showcased an easily identifiable ‘Tim Burton touch’ — a mix of whimsical dark humour, weird production design and bizarre characterisation. So, hours before watching Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, which returns Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara to their roles, a rewatch was necessary…especially to realise why the sequel was unnecessary.

The screenplay by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (from a story by Gough, Millar and Seth Grahame-Smith) begins with the familiar cartoonishly-spooky background score by Danny Elfman (who did the first film’s music as well) that has the camera flying over miniatures of the small town of Winter River, and then to the ominous house on the hill where the film is mostly set. However, instead of a giant spider crawling up to the house as in the last film, here we meet a far more scary figure silhouetted in the window: Lydia Deetz (Ryder), the young goth girl from Beetlejuice, who has now grown into a goth single mom-cum-TV host of a show about supernatural hauntings.

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice fails to be a worthy sequel to the original film by Tim Burton

Lydia, who still sees ghosts, is annoyingly pandered by Rory (Justin Theroux), who manages her career, produces her show and wants to marry her. It takes a mere second to realise that she is not into him, but with no husband (he passed away, yet she cannot see his ghost) — and an addiction to meds — it seems she has few good options.

Lydia is informed that her dad, Charles, has died in a strange accident. Overwhelmed, and trying to get away from Rory, she gets in touch with her mom (O’Hara) — now an “artist” who has grown up from her sculpting days in the last film — and insists on returning to her old town for dad’s last rites, with her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega). When they get to town, Astrid, who doesn’t get along with mom, crashes into her romantic interest Arthur (Jeremy Frazier), while her grandmother goes silly with weird rituals pertaining to the last-rites.

On the flipside, in the world of the dead (who live a thriving undead life), a freak accident releases Delores (Monica Bellucci, still as gorgeous as ever). Delores is a soul-sucking witch from the dark ages, and Betelgeuse’s ex-wife. In case one is wondering, that is how Beetlejuice’s name is spelled in the film itself.

The film finally gives a bit of a glimpse into Betelgeuse’s backstory, but forgets to explain why the maniac spirit has the powers he wields, or why, after being eaten by a sandworm at the climax of the last film, he is even alive at all (even the undead can die, as we learn from Delores’ introduction).

Delores has one unexplained agenda: to kill Betelgeuse, so the undead police — led by the half-over-the-top Willem Dafoe — wants the “demon” to lie low. The plot, concerned with keeping things real and weird, goes every which way before falling straight into the undead hell where the sequel’s development has lingered for years.

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice does not have the old familiar Burton touch and conveniently throws likeable characters out of the story. For example: Jeffrey Jones, the actor playing Lydia’s dad, is not in the film, despite his character roaming the underworld and having lines of dialogue (the character is shown decapitated, and Jones’ likeness is used in a clay-mation sequence). Not having Jones back for the sequel, however, is understandable given his involvement in a child sexual abuse scandal.

The story unceremoniously ejects the last film’s lead couple, the Maitlands (Geena Davis, Alec Baldwin), who haunted the Deetz house, with the line “they found a loophole.” It is meant to be funny, but it’s no laughing matter. The Maitlands were the first part’s heart and soul. Lydia, who was a semi-background character, and Betelgeuse (whom she calls a demon, and not a spirit in this film) simply don’t cut it by themselves.

Gough and Miller’s screenplay tries to twist and turn the story to make it work, forcing a surface level mother-daughter conflict in its midst, but the narrative and directorial decisions — and some awful horror setups (there is a yucky demon-baby birthing scene that should not be in any film) — makes Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice an unengaging sequel that should not have taken this long to get wrong.

Released by HKC and Warner Bros, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice is rated PG and features unfunny weird humour, and unwarranted scenes of undead gross

Published in Dawn, ICON, September 15th, 2024