Burton’s game attempt to bring the 1980s horror-comedy back from the spirit world is full of gaudy set-pieces but fails to add much to the original
, the oldest event on the circuit, likes to make the most of its past, with vintage stills in the lobby and antique retrospectives in the smaller theatres. Away from the main programme it is a veritable ghost town, a bubbling afterlife of cinematic history. On rare occasions, its spectres gatecrash the red carpet as well.
Winona Ryder reprises her role as Lydia Deetz, the plucky goth heroine from the original picture. Lydia is now a middle-aged psychic, flushed with the success of a tacky TV show but saddled with a fiance called Rory , whose man bun and new age blather immediately signify that he’s a wrong ’un. Revisiting her home town of Winter River for Halloween, Lydia is taunted by reminders of that old trickster demon , and desperately toils to safeguard her family.
Keaton himself is one of the more superfluous acts in this retro circus, on hand to introduce the film’s hand-tooled effects and strongarm the plot twists. He is running scared from his soul-sucking ex-wife , and pursued through the afterlife by Willem Dafoe’s hard-boiled ghost detective. But he remains a mothballed, one-note presence, a series of wisecracks in search of a point. Perhaps that’s the consequence of patrolling the spirit world for more than 600 years.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice beats back to the scene of past triumphs. It’s once, twice, three times a lazily amiable horror sequel; a makeweight festival opener that provides little beyond its arrangement of chintzy American Gothic. What fresh timber there is comes courtesy of a sparky subplot involving Lydia’s rebellious daughter Astrid, who is played with just the right note of soulful sullenness by Jenna Ortega.
Burton’s 1988 original was the director’s big breakthrough, indirectly paving the way for Batman, Ed Wood and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Since then, Beetlejuice has been repurposed as a TV cartoon, a video game and a flop Broadway musical, which presumably qualifies it as a franchise of sorts. But this long-time-coming sequel doesn’t add much to the myth, nor push the tale in any radical new direction.
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