Everyone knows that to summon Betelgeuse – the undead prankster from Tim Burton’s zanily macabre 1988 breakthrough – Beetlejuice - you simply have to say his name three times aloud. The belated follow-up left me wondering how many times you’d have to say it to make him go away for good.
The messy and tiresome Beetlejuice, is the latest of Hollywood’s ‘legacy sequels’ – essentially, veiled remakes of hits from a generation ago, disguised as bonus chapters.
A handful of these (Blade Runner 2049, Top Gun: Maverick, Twisters) have managed to match and even surpass their forebears, usually by embracing their unavoidable times-have-changed subtext.
But the rest have been little more than bonbon-dangling nostalgia bait, and Burton’s film falls depressingly into the second group.
The first Beetlejuice boasted a premise as intriguing as it was simple. What if the ghosts in a haunted house wanted to get rid of its new living residents? (Answer: they call in Michael Keaton, as the underworld’s preeminent bio-exorcist.) The new one, scripted by Alfred Gough and Miles Miller, instead haphazardly bolts together a series of half-formed ideas, each designed to heave one of the original’s wheels back into service.
So mother and daughter Delia and Lydia Deetz (Catherine O’Hara and Winona Ryder, neither wildly enthused) return to their once-haunted Connecticut homestead, following the grisly death of father Charles in a plane crash-stroke-shark attack.
And Lydia’s worldly wise teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) strikes up a romance with an innocent-seeming local lad (Arthur Conti): a storyline resolved in such a witlessly perfunctory way I found myself waiting for a twist that never arrived.
Meanwhile in the afterlife, Betelgeuse’s vengeful ex-wife, played by Monica Bellucci, is, I think, trying to do away him once and for all – though she’s so seldom on screen, it’s hard to work out what she’s up to, beyond serving as a mechanism for hurrying along the plot.
Throughout, you can hear the writers cackling and high-fiving each other as they crowbar in favourite details from Burton’s still hugely entertaining original, regardless of whether their inclusion makes the slightest bit of sense.
Burton remembers, at least, that Keaton’s character works best in small doses – so he’ll typically burst into a scene, deliver some growly patter or macabre effect, then bounce off. And mercifully, those effects do have the rubbery, hand-squeezed tactility of Burton’s earlier work: lashings of obvious CG here would have been a desecration.
Even today – never mind in another 36 years – it’s hard to imagine anyone with the option of watching the source plumping for this.
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