Beetle Winks

A young person hearing there’s a movie titled Beetlejuice Beetlejuice might think it’s a documentary about a Bill Gates or United Nations plan to replace red meat with other sources of protein. It’s the sequel to the 1988 movie Beetlejuice, which made director Tim Burton’s career when it earned $150 million worldwide on a small budget of $15 million. (Beetlejuice was also the first movie to be sold as a DVD by a then-new company called Netflix.)

A young person may not get some other things that happen in this movie. There aren’t four weddings and a funeral, but instead one funeral and two weddings, with one of the weddings featuring a music video of the 1978 Donna Summer disco version of Richard Harris’s 1968 “MacArthur Park,” lyrics, and a version of the 1970s tv show Soul Train’s theme song. Burton was born in August 1958 and was a high school student during the early days of Soul Train and a college student in the days of Donna Summer and disco.

In the original Beetlejuice, young Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) is a Goth girl who can see the dead 11 years before M. Night Shyamalan gave Haley Joel Osment the Sixth Sense. Her wealthy parents (Catherine O’Hara and Jeffrey Jones) have fled Manhattan to buy a house in a small Connecticut town, upsetting the young but deceased married couple (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) who owned and still haunt the house, and want to get the bougie renovators out before they destroy their home’s perfect rural simplicity.

Since 1988 several of these actors have had scandalous legal troubles. Winona Ryder with shoplifting, Alec Baldwin with manslaughter, and Jeffrey Jones with pedophilia. Only Winona reprises her role in the new film.

It’s black humor. A really young viewer might not get some inside jokes the film makes about the cast members not returning from the earlier movie. The funeral that starts off Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is that of the Deetz patriarch, played by Jones, a funeral at which pre-teen boys and girls in altar boy garb sing Day-O, the song sung by Harry Belafonte in the first film. Jones only appears in the new film as an animated cartoon and then a headless body in the afterlife.

Several plots run simultaneously and entwine. One involves the ghost of a succubus played by Tim Burton’s current romantic partner, Italian model and actress Monica Bellucci, who plays Beetlejuice’s first wife, out to seek revenge by consuming his soul and giving him a permanent death where he won’t even exist as a ghost. In another plotline Jenna Ortega almost reprises her character of Wednesday (also directed by Burton), here as the daughter not of Gomez and Morticia Addams but instead as the daughter of Lydia Deetz (Ryder). She also sees the dead and has a first crush on a boy who turns out to be the ghost of a homicidal teen who died decades earlier, and seeks to steal her life to return to the world of the living. As these ghosts of killers and succubae pull living people into the afterlife or attempt to cross back into the world of the living, an afterlife police force seek to apprehend them, led by Willem Dafoe. Here’s the second inside joke, at the expense of Alec Baldwin, as Dafoe plays the ghost of an actor killed on set when a grenade on his police drama turns out to be live, not just a prop.

Jenna Ortega gets to show off her dancing again, as she did in the Netflix series Wednesday, when she, Ryder, O’Hara and Justin Theroux (in real life Jennifer Aniston’s ex-husband, here the manager and suitor of Lydia Deetz) are compelled by Beetlejuice to dance to the best of Donna Summers.

The original Beetlejuice was praised by Pauline Kael, and given low marks by Janet Maslin and Roger Ebert. It won only a few major awards but I think Kael had it right. This sequel is likewise colorful, funny, inventive and high-energy. Still, Justin Theroux has much less rizz than the young Baldwin, Jeffery Jones is more hysterical and engaging than is Dafoe, and Monica Bellucci, while adequate, seems like a nepo hire compared to the young Geena Davis.