Beetlejuice Beetlejuice movie review: An ideal fan service to resuscitate an age-old IP

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice movie review

Film: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Cast: Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O'Hara, Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, Jenna Ortega, Willem Dafoe, Arthur Conti
Director: Tim Burton
Rating: 3/5
Runtime: 104 min

This sequel to the 1988 horror comedy about a renegade "bio-exorcist" liberated from the afterlife, is inventive, appropriately ghoulish and humorous. Burton may not have been at his best of late but with this sequel, he appears to have resuscitated his form. This sequel is a fun outing with a fairly valid reason to exist. That can't really be said of the numerous sequels that many cinema IP's have generated over the years.

Jenna Ortega and Monica Belluci are among the welcome new additions to the old crew of Keaton, Ryder, Catherine O'Hara and shrunken-headed Bob. Three generations of Deetz family return to Winter River. Ryder as Lydia Deetz is now a widowed mother famous for hosting a paranormal reality show called Ghost House, where she invites viewers to dare to share chilling experiences of unexplained phenomena in their homes. From triggering visions of Keaton's Beetlejuice sitting among the studio audience we learn of her still unresolved haunted past. Lydia's strained relationship with her teenage daughter, Astrid (Ortega), who chafes at her reluctance to divulge information about her late father, Richard (Santiago Cabrera), is the cause of great resentment. Astrid wants Lydia to communicate with Richard's ghost and Lydia's reluctance makes Astrid believe that her mother's powers are all hokum. So its Astrid who accidentally opens the portal to the Afterlife.There's a different dynamic now between Lydia and her artist stepmother Delia (O'Hara) who has shifted from sculpture to mixed media and uses her own body as a canvas.

We see Monica Bellucci as a demoness who stitches-up her hacked-up body parts that have shaken loose from crates in the afterlife - while the BeeGees ‘Tragedy' plays on. This is just one of the many callbacks to the original- all laced with pop-culture references and inspired set-pieces. Bellucci as Delores is there to suck the soul out of the netherworld, in her mission to claim the soul of her husband, Beetlejuice. The reappearance of shrunken-headed stooges and deadly sandworms are hints that there's a linkup to the original film.

The narrative feels scattered at the start and then begins to take some shape as Burton's characters start to gain some meaning in the byplay. Screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar working on Seth Grahame-Smith's story make it a crafty stitch-up of subplots that come at you from different directions and find cohesion in the recurring elements from the original 1988 film. The film also keeps it real by using more of practical animatronic effects and less of CGI.

The pacing is bouncy, there's a steady stream of humour and the actors play-up to the out-of-control grisly comic riffs bordering on lunacy. This sequel may not be as monster-happy as the original but it certainly gets you in a rollicking frame of mind. It's ideal in terms of fan service.