You Only Live Twice
I have to be honest. I had never seen the first “Beetlejuice” when I sat down to watch this sequel and it took me a while to process the manic energy and comedic nonsense that director Tim Burton brings, once again, to the big screen.
It’s taken almost 27 years to find a decent story to resurrect Michael Keaton’s “bio-exorcist,” as well as the other main characters played by Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara.
In the first film, a couple played by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis are in a car accident involving a covered bridge and an icy river. When they arrive back home, they discover they died in the accident. The fact that they have no reflections when staring into a mirror is the main clue.
As ghosts, they are not allowed to leave the house, so they hire Beetlejuice to scare away the new inhabitants, Charles and Delia Deetz, played by Jeffrey Jones and O’Hara.
Baldwin and Davis are invisible to Charles and Delia, but not to their daughter Lydia, played by Ryder. They summon Beetlejuice for help, but then decide not to hire him, so, he wreaks havoc on the Deetz family nonetheless.
The supernatural events inspire Charles to hatch a plan to make their small town of Winter Harbor into a tourist mecca, a la Salem, Massachusetts.
There’s a lot more and, in the end, Beetlejuice is cursed to live eternally in an afterlife waiting room.
Fast-forward to now and Lydia is a goth grownup marketing her connections to the dead and undead as host of a reality show called “Ghost Town.”
Her mother, now estranged, is meanwhile mourning the loss of her husband who was chomped in half by a shark. In true Burton fashion, his remains wander the underworld, occasionally spurting blood from his lower extremities.
There’s also a subplot involving the first wife of Beetlejuice, played by Italian actress Monica Bellucci, who had a much more commanding role in the James Bond flick “Spectre.” Here she is a dismembered corpse who summons her various body parts and then staples them together to further hunt and haunt Beetlejuice.
Frankly, for me, her character is more compelling than any other and what little time she has onscreen is wasted.
Fans of the first film will enjoy the little homages Burton offers to that first effort but first-timers like me will be baffled by scenes that spool out to no great effect. It often seems like the screenwriters cared little about continuity and just threw together anything that would fill roughly 90 minutes in service to Beetlejuice cultists.
The one scene I thought was inspired involves a “Soul Train,” a disco-infused ride into the Great Beyond, complete with afros and bell-bottoms. Some say the earth will end in ice. I say rightly in Wind and Fire.