Skip to main content

It's Always Showtime

 


1988's Beetlejuice is unique blend of visual style, humour, lite horror, performance and trappings of the decade. How to recreate this is a question sequel Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice doesn't even try to answer. Instead it throws its weird and wonderful characters into as many chaotic scenarios as Tim Burton and team can think of and do so at such a manic pace that the viewer doesn't have time to think if they are enjoying it as much. Thanks to the amount of talent on display, this method ends up working a treat.

The story begins with Winona Ryder's Lydia Deetz, now the star of a TV show where she contacts the dead, receiving the news that her father has died. Consequently, she reunites with step mother Delia (Catherine O'Hara) for a memorial service come art project back at the old family home. Accompanying the returning cast members are Lydia's daughter Jenna Ortega and new partner Justin Theroux. Ghostly couple Gina Davis and Alec Baldwin are no longer in residence (a throwaway line is all the explanation we get) but Beetlejuice is still periodically skulking around their model village with designs on reuniting with his former bride to be. 

From there things move at a break-neck pace with subplots galore; Rider and Theroux have an upcoming wedding, Ortega meets a mysterious love interest in the village while butting heads with her mother and mourning her deceased father, O'Hara is doing her weird art stuff, Beetlejuice's ex wife is after him and sucking souls in the process, we follow an afterlife cop who was given the job because he played one on TV when alive. It's a lot to cram into a movie that comes in around 100 mins but it manages to accommodate it all effortlessly by adopting a dream like story structure where things just happen when they need to, regardless of logic. The rules you established in the first film getting in your way? Ignore them. Inconvenient for Beetlejuice to be on screen? Have him go to the "little boys room". Need people to handily be in the same place as each other? Make it so. The result is a story that doesn't quite hold together but it doesn't really matter, in fact it just adds to the surreal vibe of proceedings. 

And surreal it is. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice may be even weirder than its predecessor with animated sequences, black and white golden age of horror homages and musical interludes.The events are equally dark but the tone is lighter, offering a pretty flippant attitude towards life and death, and it airs more on the side of out and out comedy. The unique vibe it creates allows the film to get away the things that often derail nostalgia sequels. All the call backs and fan service lines are here but worn lightly enough that it feels like they are added in the spirit of fun rather than as a painfully wedged in studio mandate. Like in say, the last Ghostbusters film. Even adding in a Beetlejuice origin story doesn't poison the well things as it's done flippantly and pretty hilariously. 

The returning cast slip effortlessly back into their roles and the new additions fit the world perfectly. Willem Dafoe's Hollywood cop is a blast and Justin Theroux has a great time as the slimily over-earnest new man is Lydia's life. Is Monica Bellucci here so that Burton can indulge his Frankenstein's Bride fetish by dressing up his latest partner as a hot zombie? Maybe, but it's never a bad to have Monica Bellucci in your film. We are even treated to a Danny DeVito appearance. 

It's still Micheal Keaton's show of course and he doesn't miss a beat slipping back into the skin of the "bio exorcist". Wisely he doesn't get much more screen time than he did back in 1988, keeping his impact at maximum. The film makers also avoid the trap of turning him into a good guy, however much he aids the rest of the cast we are left in doubt that allowing him to stay in the world of the living would be a disaster. He plays the hits from the first movie while adding in some new tricks and it always feels the film picks up a notch when he is on screen, which is as it should be.

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice really has no right to exist. Fortunately, it feels like it was born out of a bunch of friends desire to hang out and make something fun rather than an executive's bean counting. It may be much messier than its predecessor but it is often funny and always creative. So much fun I wouldn't even mind if they decided to let the juice loose a third time. 

8 Asps de-fanged out of 10.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Space (and Body) Invaders

  With Alien: Romulus , Fede Alvarez becomes the latest director to try and recreate the magic of Alien and/or Aliens. Unsurprisingly he doesn't get close to those two masterpieces but he does serve an atmospheric slice of sci fi horror that may well scratch an itch for those unimpressed with the heavy handed musings of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. Set in the time period between Alien and Aliens, the story of Romulus is a back to basics haunted house but in space tale about a group of young miners attempting to escape corporate servitude by breaking into a derelict space station and liberating enough fuel to keep them in stasis while they reach another developed planet. Turns out the station is more decimated then decommissioned and they soon find themselves on the bottom of the local food chain. The break in may be a group effort but it's clear from the off that the main focus of the story is Cailee Spaeny's Rain and her "brother" Andy, a salvaged synthetic hu
Post a Comment
Read more

Stone the Crows

  One thing you can say about The Crow is that is that it has delivered on expectations. They are remaking that crap 90's action film The Crow? Sounds like a bad idea. It's been in development hell for over a decade? It's definitely going to be bad. The Snow White and the Huntsman guy is directing it? His films are quite bad. The trailers out? It looks bad. Film is here? Yeh it's bad.  To call the film a remake is a actually a little unfair, it's really a new adaptation of the graphic novel source material (which sucks to begin with) and directer Rupert Sanders has tried to make the film something more than its 1994 counterpart, he just fails at a very fundamental level. This is still the story of Eric, brought back from the dead to kill those who offed him and his girl but this time we lean more into the romance side of the tale, with his rampage motivated by the idea of saving his loves soul rather than just seeking vengeance. The problem is that there is a compl
Post a Comment
Read more

No Love Island

 Blink Twice was originally going to be called Pussy Island,  meaning it joins the likes of American Fiction (Fuck) and A Family Affair (Mother Fucker) in adopting a disappointing title downgrade. Fortunately, that's pretty much the only disappointing thing about this stellar directing debut from Zoe Kravitz.  Naomi Ackie plays nail technician Frida who, along with her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) is whisked away to billionaire Channing Tatum's private island after meeting him at  A function they are working. The partying is more reserved than she was expecting and she is convinced she is having a great time but as the reality of accompanying a bunch of strangers to the middle of nowhere and giving up your means of contacting the outside world starts to creep in, Frida can't shake the feeling things might not be as idyllic as they seem. The film this will be most compared to is Get Out and while it doesn't quite hit those heights it brings the same kind of exuberant ener
Post a Comment
Read more

Level Down

Borderlands is a strange game to make a film adaptation of. Being a "looter-shooter" it is light on narrative and character with the joy of the game coming from unleashing ludicrous weapons upon hordes of enemies.  In order to succeed the movie really needed to nail the wacky tone and look of the game's world while adding in sufficient story and character to make the audience care about what is going on. You could generously say director Eli Roth succeeds at half of one of these goals. It may be harsh to pin the films shortcomings on Roth as it is unclear how much of this is the movie he signed up to make. Announced in 2015 and in active development since 2020 the script underwent multiple re writes and had Tim Miller come in for weeks of reshoots after Roth departed the project. The horror veteran certainly seems an odd fit for what ended up being a PG13 action comedy. There is defiantly a much better Borderlands movie that could have been made if he'd been allowed
Post a Comment
Read more