If you are anything like me, when Halloween rolls around it’s time to curl up and watch all your favorite nostalgic “scary movies” from your childhood. One of my personal go-to’s is the original “Beetlejuice,” so when I saw that the sequel was coming out a little less than 40 years after the original was released I was immediately intrigued.
“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” follows the combined story of the entire Deetz family: Lydia, Charles, Astrid and Delia (as well as Beetlejuice of course) as they traverse the underworld searching for each other.
One of the few things that the movie suffers from is the pure amount of plot that it has. From what I saw, there are about six to seven different plots and storylines to follow. Given the movie’s runtime of an hour and 45 minutes, it’s not a surprise that several of these plots were very underdeveloped and unexplained.
First is the central conflict and plot of the movie, Astrid, who is Lydia Deetz’s daughter, is tricked by the ghost of a dead serial killer into giving up her soul and life to him, so he can keep on living. She is forced into the underworld and almost loses her life entirely but is saved by Lydia and Beetlejuice at the last second, who have snuck into the underworld to do so. This plot was very fun and very in tune with the original movie. Seeing Lydia and Beetlejuice work together for once was charming, even If it was due to dire circumstances, and Jenna Ortega fit in incredibly well with the rest of the cast.
One of the subplots of the movie I was not a fan of was all of Lydia’s romantic and emotional troubles. While it’s expected that her character will be melodramatic as she was in the original movie, all of her problems now seem to surround men and her getting manipulated by them which ends up portraying her as weak. This all felt very out-of-character for her and I would’ve enjoyed seeing a bit more of the Lydia from the past, who was a bit more sarcastic and had more personality, rather than this wet-blanket portrayal that we ended up with.
Another thing I was looking for when I walked into this movie was seeing how they handled subbing in Charles, portrayed originally by Jeffery Jones who has since been arrested and convicted of several crimes, as it was mentioned that he was a character in the sequel. Fortunately, the character had his head bit off while birdwatching so there were no conflicts of interest there, and It made for some funny gags as the headless Charles stumbled around the underworld looking for his family.
Finally, we arrive at maybe the most random plot of the whole film, Beetlejuice’s Ex-Wife Delores. Introduced to us in a far too long eye candy sequence as she suggestively staples her body parts together, Delores serves little purpose other than an omnipotent threat to wrap up the entire plot. If she had been removed from the film entirely it would’ve made no difference and the movie would’ve had more time to develop other, more important characters and plots.
The overall aesthetics and soundtrack were phenomenal, the soul train joke was well done and the newer areas of the underworld fit into the pre-existing setpieces from the original film. This movie is a shining example of a sequel done right, balancing new jokes and actors for the newer audience, and incorporating the original for the older audience.
