(Say it) Three times a winner?
As Keaton’s wildest character manifests once more, can a second outing top the bizarre glory of Beetlejuice?
First up, thanks ever so much for joining me here on Orion’s Shoulder. Please share this with all your mates and encourage them to sign up for movie chat and other artistic meanderings.
I named the joint after Rutger Hauer’s memorably buffed-up ‘Tears in the Rain’ monologue in Blade Runner, as Deckard’s mortal enemy Roy Batty offers a little advice on life while in the process of shutting down and shuffling off this mortal coil.
You know what sits on Orion’s shoulder? The blazing red supergiant Betelgeuse, the hellfire glittering star whose name gothic fantasy filmmaker Tim Burton borrowed for his grotesque demonic horndog creation, anarchically depicted by a wickedly fun Michael Keaton in 1988 bizarre-ity, Beetlejuice.
Burton’s off-the-wall imagining of a bureaucratically mired afterlife that looks for all the world like a back-alley doctor’s dubious practice, drunk on petrol fumes and too much Dali, was gloriously surreal, with practical effects doing the heavy lifting in creating the unfortunate souls lost here. From tyre-flattened workers slung along on washing line hooks, the shrunken heads of the cursed and marvellously macabre minutiae, like smoke emitting from the slit throat of the late, impossibly great Sylvia Sidney’s underworld boss, Juno.
Betelgeuse’s unruly energy unleashed the weirdest forces into sleepy Winter River – stripey stop-animation sand worms ahoy – captivating my little brother and me. As repulsive as he is, with his grotesque sex pest ways, shock of scabby, moss-laden hair, racoon-wild eyes and grubby black-and-white prison chic suit – designed by Aggie Guerard Rodgers (who began her career with George Lucas’ American Graffiti – you can’t help but root for his rotten antics.
This even as the schlubby malcontent spirit terrorises the Deetz family – emo teen Lydia (Winona Ryder), savage sculptor step-mum Delia (Catherine O’Hara) and Wall Street bad dad Charles (Jeffrey Jones) – including a whacky dinner party possession to the tune of Harry Belafonte’s whacky Banana Boat (Day-O) song. And his doing unmentionable things to the faces of dear, sweet, recently deceased couple Adam and Barbara Maitland (a very Rick Moranis-looking Alec Baldwin and the delightful Geena Davis) as they desperately try and decipher an unintelligible Handbook for the Recently Deceased.
Visually resplendent in a deliberately hokey way that leans into its Halloween-theatrical flourishes, Burton’s topsy-turvy fantasy was grounded by brilliant work from Ryder, our lonely and misunderstood teen window into a world turned upside down, who would go on to shine even brighter in Burtons next feature, Edward Scissorhands. A film full of wild swings, O’Hara’s high camp and Keaton’s skeeviness are delightfully offset by Baldwin and Davis’ three spoons of sugar uber-normality.
Spawning both a cartoon series and a musical after raking it in at the box office on a modest budget, the only surprise in manifesting a sequel – as if a Hollywood exec said Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse to a teeny town model – is that it’s taken this long.
Summoning the dead
So, 36 years later, was Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (surely this title implies a trilogy?) worth the wait? The shortest answer is YES.
Dig a little deeper into the cardboard foundations of that teeny town and some aspects work better than others. These are different times, and as gross-out as Betelgeuse remains, he’s definitely been toned down, for better or worse (your mileage may vary). Long-term Burton collaborator Keaton remains as mercurial a screen presence as ever. I still felt oddly complicit in wanting his evil counterpart to succeed, even as he once again tries to press gang Lydia into an unwanted marriage.
But the uncomfortable stuff actually comes from who’s not there. And I don’t mean the Matilands. Alfred Gough and Miles Millar’s screenplay weirdly brushes off their absence with one half-arsed line, but for what it’s worth, Davis has said she didn’t want to show ghosts aging. Instead, the ickiness arises from just how present Charles Deetz is despite being a registered sex offender.
Killed off in-universe, surely a half-arsed line is all he deserves, with his death having occurred years before we begin? Instead, his gruesome fate is relayed to widowed single mum and spooky TV show host Lydia by her now also widowed and branched out to performance artist step mum, Delia, receiving a stop-motion animated flashback leading to a grizzly end.
Already a bit too much, Charles’ funeral – overseen by Burn Gorman’s alcoholic, fire and brimstone-spouting priest – becomes a central plot point, with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice also making the inexplicably icky decision to have his dismembered corpse wander around the underworld interacting with other characters, despite having already established that not all dead people can be seen by their loved ones. His bad spirit just won’t go away, and I think this is a mistake.
As is casting Wednesday star Jenna Ortega as Lydia’s estranged, boarding school-bound goth daughter Astrid, which feels a little bit lazy, typecast to a tee. And while she does get a reasonably exciting and suitably creepy subplot, requiring some heroics from Lydia, overall Astrid – another star name – doesn’t make much impact. Ryder is on top form, however, with Lydia now stuck in a co-dependent sort-of-relationship with her coercive controlling producer Rory (Justin Theroux), a leery character fond of hiding behind self-help gibberish but whom Lydia is, at best, lukewarm and Delia and Astrid despise.
The magnificent Monica Bellucci is the most impressive addition, picking up on a (literally) throwaway line and sight gag in the original as the owner of the severed ring-wearing finger Betelgeuse professed meant absolutely nothing to him while first attempting to manhandle Lydia down the aisle.
A Frankenstein’s bride fabulosa, Delores staple-guns herself back together, dispatching the afterlife’s janitor (Batman Returns star Danny DeVito replacing Simmy Bow) in a gruesomely great sequence that’s as close to macabre horror as we get here. The black-and-white movie-style flashback to explain her connection to Keaton’s ghoul is gloriously OTT, as is her stalking the dead to make them deader despite the best efforts of a game Willem Dafoe’s late actor-turned-underworld cop, Wolf Jackson. It’s a real shame he and Delores get a little lost in a heaving cast.
Return to Winter River?
With these caveats out of the way, it’s weirdly wonderful to be back in the company of Keaton, Ryder, O’Hara and co in what is, in its janky bones, a nostalgia trip for the deathly committed. From the mist-shrouded opening sequence once more swooping into a rain-slicked Winter River, replete with a skittering Danny Elfman’s score, we’re whooshed back into a beloved misadventure.
Four-time Oscar-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood runs wild with the sartorial shenanigans, including an astounding outfit for Bellucci’s scenery-chewing and soul-sucking Dolores, natty suits for Bob and his shrunken-headed call centre cohort – Betelgeuse’s co-workers – and a call back to a show-stopping look for Ryder. The practical effects are marvellous, even if too much computer trickery is overlaid for my liking.
In the which is best stakes, the spectre of the original looms large, but the fun haunts the wonky halls of both. Keaton has way more to do here, but judicious use of his hair-brained mania leant more wham to his mayhem first time around. There’s a lot going on, maybe a bit too much, but that straining at the seams only works in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s favour, with O’Hara a comedic genius who can out-sass anyone, even a drongo demon, with Dafoe deliriously cuckoo, too.
When (second to?) last rites are read, Burton’s latest missive from Winter River is delightfully bonkers, a wild-hearted helping of supernatural malarky that will set you skipping mischievously from the cinema.
Can't say it enough but your writing is always superb and such a delight to read!