Beetlejuice Beetlejuice overview by Brian Viner
How dispiritingly apt it is in this cinematic universe of sequels and franchises that the picture chosen to open the world’s most venerable film festival should be Tim Burton‘s follow-up to his 1988 hit Beetlejuice, long-awaited by just about nobody. Nobody I know, anyway.
The 81st Venice Film Festival opened last night with an impressive cluster of stars on the red carpet, but the movie they were here to celebrate – Beetlejuice Beetlejuice – is not quite worthy of the honour.
The 1988 original was a comedy-horror classic, which to paraphrase the title of one of the decade’s best-known songs, showed that some ghouls just want to have fun.
It was a further indication after Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985) that Burton, then still in his mid-twenties, had an outsize imagination. And a couple of years later the point was reinforced by the gloriously weird Edward Scissorhands (1990).
But the first Beetlejuice was very much of its time: a camp, vampy, Reagan-era mickey-take of yuppies and consumerism. Hard as screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar strain to imbue this sequel with the same spirit, they don’t really pull it off.
Jenna Ortega, Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder starring in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Pictured: Willem DaFoe in a scene from ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’
Actress Jenna Ortega starring in a scene from ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’
Winona Ryder, still in her teens when she appeared in Beetlejuice (and Edward Scissorhands), reprises her role as Lydia Deetz.
The teenage goth is a middle-aged widow now, a distant mother to moody Astrid (Jenna Ortega) and host psychic of a popular TV show called Ghost House, which is produced by her creepy boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux).
After Lydia learns from her stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara, another 1988 original) that her father has been eaten by a shark, the family gathers for the funeral back in the picture-postcard New England town of Winter River and Rory prepares a singularly ill-timed proposal of marriage.
But in the meantime, the decidedly dead demon Betelgeuse (pronounced Beetlejuice and extravagantly played once again by Michael Keaton) has designs on the grown-up and very much alive Lydia who, you might remember, he tried to trick into marrying him all those decades ago – in the days when nobody raised much of an eyebrow at a lustful older man, deceased or not, preying on a schoolgirl as a premise for comedy.
Just as he did in 1988, Burton has oodles of fun with the great hereafter. The Afterlife Call Centre is staffed by a motley collection of spooks, while a deceased actor (Willem Dafoe) playing the part of a detective (a recurring joke that recurringly falls flat) runs the Afterlife Crime Unit.
He instructs his wraiths to ‘leave no gravestone unturned’ in pursuit of the woman Betelgeuse actually did end up marrying, the psychotic leader of a soul-sucking death cult called Dolores (Monica Bellucci), who now wants him back.
The cast of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice at the 81st Venice International Film Festival on August 28
A screengrab from the 1988 film Beetlejuice directed by Tim Burton
Michael Keaton in the original film Beetlejuice from 1988
While all this is going on, young Astrid takes a shine to a nice boy, Jeremy (played by Arthur Conti, Tom Conti’s grandson) but of course, nothing in Winter River is quite as it seems and before long she too is tottering on the precipice of the great beyond.
As Astrid, Ortega gives a very appealing performance and in terms of her career this film, however it fares at the box office, seems likely to sound whatever might be the opposite of a death knell.
The wildly successful Netflix series Wednesday, The Addams Family spin-off, made her a small-screen star. This, following her appearances in three of the Scream slasher movies, should cement her stardom on the silver screen. She might want to branch out from the kicking-the-bucket genre but I guess that’s up to her.
In its favour, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice lasts a sensible hour and 45 minutes and a cracking retro soundtrack includes the Bee Gees singing Tragedy as well as the Jimmy Webb classic MacArthur Park. But it too often feels more like an assembly of macabre ideas from Burton’s undeniably fertile mind than a coherent film.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice opens across the UK on September 6.
