‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’: Ghosts, gags and goths

In Tim Burton’s sequel, Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, and Jenna Ortega make macabre magic.

By James Verniere/Boston Movie News

Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice” opened in theaters 36 years ago. Scripted by Michael McDowell (“The Nightmare Before Christmas”), Larry Wilson (“The Addams Family”), and Warren Skaaren (“Batman”), the film was a kitschy dark comedy about what happens after we die. It featured a character who resembled a recently disinterred clown and sounded like a potty-mouthed fourth member of The Three Stooges. His unforgettable name was Beetlejuice, a “bio-exorcist” claiming to help the recently deceased navigate the afterlife. In the title role, Michael Keaton, who would star in Burton’s “Batman” one year later, made an indelible impression on a generation. Let us not forget the lasting impact of 16-year-old Winona Ryder as the death-fixated, goth-garbed, ghost-friendly Lydia Deetz, a marvelous antithesis of a Disney princess. Why did it take so long to bring them back?

*Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” (Parisa Taghizadeh/Warner Bros. Pictures)*

Burton’s long-awaited “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” once again featuring a scary-jaunty score by the director’s longtime collaborator Danny Elfman, cannot possibly match its predecessor in terms of originality. But it is a lot of fun and not just fan service. The new film, which was scripted by Alfred Gough (“Spider-Man 2”), Miles Millar (“Spider-Man 2”), and Seth Grahame-Smith, focuses on the Deetz family: step-grandmere and artist Delia Deetz (razor-sharp Catherine O’Hara), stepdaughter and mother Lydia Deetz (artfully depressed Winona Ryder) and Lydia’s daughter Astrid (TV’s Wednesday Addams Jenna Ortega). Charles Deetz, who was played by Jeffrey Jones, has just died in a Claymation-like plane crash. Lydia works as a “psychic mediator” and fronts her own TV show “Ghost House.” Her TV producer boyfriend Rory (amusingly oleaginous Justin Theroux) dotes upon her but is a psychobabble-ing scoundrel. In a small, tasty role, Danny DeVito, Burton’s original Penguin, appears as an old maintenance worker who—cue the Bee Gees—disturbs wooden boxes containing the dismembered body parts of Beetlejuice’s disgruntled, Vampira-like ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci).

The Deetz family returns to Winter River, Conn., for Charles’ funeral service (the choir sings a Calypso song, naturally). Rory proposes to Lydia at the funeral. We meet notably-named smarmy local reverend Father Damien (Burn Gorman). In the attic, Astrid discovers the model of the town with the tiny cemetery where Beetlejuice resides. She also meets a sensitive and handsome local boy named Jeremy (Arthur Conti), who is—hint, hint—reading Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece “Crime and Punishment.” Of course, the “Juice” makes his reappearance. He is still the ultimate ’80s party animal—emphasis on animal—and the moldy, lecherous “trickster demon” wants more than ever to marry Lydia.

With shout-outs to “Jaws,” “Lifeforce,” “Pirana,” the “Chucky” franchise and the great Italian horror and giallo master Mario Bava and more, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is a horror film buff’s phantasmagoric playground. The sandworm is back together with the shrunken-headed dead and other Lovecraftian elements, including the purgatorial waiting room for the recently deceased. Instead of the Hogwarts Express, we get a dubious disco-themed Soul Train to such stops as the Great Beyond.

Yes, the Willem Dafoe role of an actor still playing a tough cop in the afterlife does not amount to a hill of beans and could easily have been cut. But it is great fun to see a “cadre of influencers” sucked into their smartphones, and I believe Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park” is going to get the “Stranger Things”-Kate Bush-”Running Up That Hill” treatment after the young crowd sees (and hears) this. Am I the only one who can’t wait to see Keaton’s Beetlejuice slug it out with Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker at the box office? Keaton is in fine fettle as the dead lech, his fierce comic sensibility undimmed. Burton favorite O’Hara shines as the still self-involved (“I am my canvas”) Delia. But Ryder, a Goth femme fatale out of an Edward Gorey illustration, once again stamps the film with her particularly unsettling brand of anxiety, leaving an aptly Burton-esque hole in the heart of all the fun.