The movie might suffer from the narrative unevenness of most modern Burton movies (Grahame-Smith also worked on the lethal Dark Shadows script), but the director’s creativity and ingenuity seems sparked for the first time in nearly 20 years. Almost every scene has a visual fiendishness that is cackle-inducing, and the emphasis on returning to stop-motion effects and unapologetically hokey in-camera visual trickery seems as refreshing for the people making the movie as it is to watch.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a joke bag movie where nearly every frame is about either setup, punchline, or delivery, and more of them land than not. This is most true for Keaton who relishes returning to the decayed makeup, but it could just as easily apply to Ryder in the scenes she shares with Keaton or O’Hara. Gone is the modern maternal fretting Ryder is tasked with doing each season of Stranger Things. The further Lydia gets away from the Beetlejuice 2’s first act, the more the freak flag emerges, reminding the audience of why she was the Gen X alt-girl star of the ‘90s. Maybe it really should have just been a Beetlejuice and Lydia on adventures movie?
Then again, if that had happened we would not have enjoyed the sight of O’Hara stealing nearly as many scenes as Keaton. Delia Deetz turns the loss of her husband into window-dressing for her greatest fixation: herself. O’Hara’s talent for portraying decadently untalented people has obviously never gone away. Just look at Schitt’s Creek. But in as silly and abstract a movie as this, O’Hara is allowed to not worry about things like texture or introspection. Deelia and O’Hara turn self-absorption into otherworldly charm.
The same can be made for a cornucopia of random and endearing touches. At one point, Burton uses Beetlejuice’s reminisces of his marriage with Bellucci as an excuse to homage the black-and-white Italian horror cinema of Mario Bava; in another sequence, a major character’s death scene is jarringly, but cunningly, recounted through the use of claymation. None of these elements necessarily complement one another, but the filmmakers’ maniacal eagerness to throw the kitchen sink at you, as well as the piping, the water tank, and a whole sewer line, browbeats the viewer into laughing along.
The grand finale of the film is where Beetlejuice Beetlejuice inevitably reverts to playing all the hits from the original film in one spectacle, bringing its whole cast (including a largely wasted Ortega) together for a sequence that is only missing Harry Belafonte. But by that point, its eagerness to please and entertain, as if it were a Barnum and Bailey’s circus located inside a Hot Topic, is so wholesome that you cannot begrudge the shameless back-to-back callbacks.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is no all-time classic movie to be cherished by generations-to-come of unborn Goth kids. I’m not even sure it’s a good movie. But it is a good time, and to finally have that again from Burton and Keaton definitely made this writer happy to enter the tent.