Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

An overwritten mess but pleasantly fun nostalgia.

Sometime in early 1991, six-year-old me, freshly arrived in the United States, in a whirlwind of exposure to American culture and California life, sat down with my mom after she rented two movies. This is one of my most vivid memories from that time, and I think about it whenever I reminisce about my early experience as an immigrant to the United States. My mom, who always had a morbid streak wanted to watch horror movies, so the two VHS tapes, in their brown plastic cases, she brought from the rental store across the street were Poltergeist which I was excited to see, and a strange one that caught her attention. The strange tape was Tim Burton’s 1988 Beetlejuice.

I think a lot of us when young come across a movie, novel, or music that sticks into our subconscious and like a virus shapes and influences our aesthetic sense of self. Beetlejuice was mine. That day, six-year-old Alex fell in love with melancholy goth girls¹, absurd kitsch, and morbid Americana. Beetlejuice was a near-perfect blend of grotesque comedy and absurd horror. I also became a huge Tim Burton fan at that time, going on to watch everything he’s put out ever since. To this day I will fight the point that the best Batman movies are his two with Michael Keaton² which I prefer over Nolan’s overpolished heartless trilogy.

So earlier this year when I saw the trailer for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice I was guardedly interested. I say that because I have an aversion towards all sequels, remakes, and the endless stuck culture where we rehash 80’s and 90’s culture to the point of disgusted exhaustion. But, I still hold a nostalgic attraction for the movie theater experience and there’s a decent theater five minutes from where I live that has become a great place to kill a rainy weekend with my wife and daughter. Not to mention that my daughter is six years old, exactly the age I was when I watched the original Beetlejuice. We had to do it, so last night we skipped dinner and saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice in a packed movie theater.

So how was it? Well, I think the best way to describe it, taking into account that I’ve been a long-time Burton fan, is that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was a well-made, well-acted, nostalgically pleasant film, bogged down by overstuffed incoherent writing and unnecessary characters and plot lines. This issue seems to plague a lot of contemporary movies, a strange need to add too much exposition, too many scenes that don’t do anything for the story, and way too much explanation. The recent Ghostbusters suffered significantly from the same problem of being overstuffed with characters, never allowing any of the ones you really want to follow to breathe. This has to be a side effect of the Game of Thrones multiple-character mania that has brain-rotted writers.

The original 1988 Beetlejuice concept and script were written by my favorite horror writer Michael McDowell³. His epic southern horror Blackwater Saga is a damn masterpiece and his novel The Elementals, another Southern Horror features a young morose precocious goth teen named India who is the direct prototype for Ryder’s Lydia. Meanwhile, the sequel is written by the writers of the Wednesday series and their lack of movie writing chops shows, as we get bogged down in side elements that would have made sense in a television show where they would be allowed to breathe and develop. For example, there is a great element between Jenna Ortega who plays Lydia’s daughter, Astrid, and a local townie boy who has a love for Dostoevsky and 90’s grunge. In a multi-part series, this plotline would be well developed and hold the emotional gravity that was unable to connect in such a short time. The movie is also overstuffed with nonsensical side stuff like Monica Belluci as Delores, Bettlejuice’s wife, a soul-sucking evil Sally stitched together with staples, bent on some sort of revenge or something. The character goes nowhere and makes no sense. Equally too much time is wasted on Defoe's undead actor police detective that just failed to capture me and wasted screen time.

Where the film succeeds is in its principal cast. Michael Keaton slips back into the pervert demon antics of the Juice with ease and you can tell he is enjoying every second of it. Equally so the core of the movie is Winona Ryder and Cathrine O’Haras, daughter and step-daughter relationship. During the few minutes that are given to their character development, we get the most heartfelt elements of the movie. If the writers edited down the bloated script, cutting out unnecessary characters and sticking the focus on O’Hara, Ryder, and Ortega’s⁴ characters we would have had a much better movie about intergenerational family.

Overall Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was a fun, irreverent movie with a few outstanding moments overshadowed by bloated inferior writing, unnecessary plotlines, and drowned in post post irony memberberries, but my six-year-old daughter liked it. Is it worth watching, maybe, only if you have a love of Tim Burton from the late 80s and ’90s, but don’t expect it to be anything fresh or revolutionary in the same way the original or Edward Scissorhands was in the 90s. But I will say, the last twenty minutes of the movie are fantastic. Burton gives us a ridiculous over-the-top wedding scene with musical ventriloquism that comes near close to the Day-O scene in the first. This scene alone saved the movie for me.

Go see it, it’s a decent time at the movies, but I have to be honest, it does leave me nostalgic for an era where movies felt original and fresh and I came out of the theater excited and energized. I hope we can return to that era again, it’s been too long.

1. I mean come on now, Lidya was the spiritual blueprint for so many of my girlfriends. Also, for the record 53 year old Winona still looks great.

2. I liked Keaton in my favorite Tarantino, Jackie Brown, where he plays an ATF agent.

3. Outstanding writer of Southern Horror. Sadly passed away from AIDS in the 90’s. Read his Blackwater Saga.

4. Ortega is interesting, well, she shows potential to be a good actress but for one I don’t buy her being Ryders daughter in no fucking way. Even as her on screen dad is played by a Latin American actor, Ortega doesn’t come of as mixed race, let alone mixed with Ryders WASPY/Jewish waifishness. There is also a feeling that this character was an add on later in the creation of the script because she is inconsistent in her characterization. For one the petulant moody teenager thing is tired, but here it’s inconsistent, she is portrayed as a moody outcast type like her mother used to be but also a severe anti ghost skeptic who rejects her mothers supernatural powers. It would have made more sense to make Ortega the anti-Lydia. The fear of every alternative goth parent, a kid that grows up to be the cheerleader popular type, rejecting the weird. I wish the movie focused more on Astrid and Lidya and developed the plot with the kid in the treehouse.