Revival of Tim Burton’s 80s favourite brings back stars Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton. Photo / supplied
Revival of Tim Burton’s 80s favourite brings back stars Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton. Photo / supplied
Beetlejuice in 1988 was, for most, the first introduction to the Tim Burton style – the cartoonish mix of horror-movie gothic, B-movie kitsch, into which actors delivered extravagantly eccentric performances. That’s worked best for the director when all that style was in service of an actual story. However, there hasn’tbeen a great Burton film since 2007′s Sweeney Todd, his adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim slasher musical. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the next generation sequel which returns to the haunted house of the original, isn’t so much a great return to form, as a mildly entertaining return to type.
Whether you like or, indeed, understand Beetlejuice Beetlejuice will depend entirely on your memory of, or affections for, the 1988 original, in which Michael Keaton stole the show with his loopy performance as the title ghoul.
Here, Keaton attempts a second heist, rather less successfully. Also back from the original are Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz – the teenage goth with the ghost-spotting abilities is now the famous host of a successful paranormal television show – and Catherine O’Hara as Lydia’s stepmother, Delia. They’re joined by Jenna Ortega (the star of Wednesday, last year’s great Burton-produced Addams Family TV spin-off) as Lydia’s sullen, ghost-sceptic daughter, Astrid. A family funeral brings them back to the old, haunted mansion and soon things are caught in a baffling web of storylines stretching between the land of the living and the afterlife and its soul-deadening bureaucracy.
That involves Betelgeuse being pursued by his first wife (Monica Bellucci), who was apparently left in pieces by their split hundreds of years ago. Willem Dafoe’s maniacal phantom detective is also on the trail. There is also time for lengthy sequences based variously on American music show Soul Train, the original Richard Harris-sung version of MacArthur Park, animated scenes involving sharks and sandworms, as well as a mildly disturbing baby Betelgeuse.
It’s all a bit of a jumble, within which are many inspired Burtonesque visual moments, but by the end, it can feel like we’ve been on a rickety ghost-train ride back to somewhere familiar but nowhere in particular.
Rating out of five: ★★★
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, directed by Tim Burton, is in cinemas now.
