"Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" - a movie review Dustin Dopps Contributor
PHOTO USE COURTESY OF UNIVERSAL PICTURES
Do you remember the movie Beetlejuice starring Michael Keaton and Catherine O'Hara Winona Ryder and Alec Baldwin and Gina Davis? The one where the couple dies and have to learn the rules of being ghosts when a new family moves into their house (which they can't leave)? And they hire Beetlejuice to scare the new owners, except he's insane and tries to marry the daughter instead.
Well, I guess 30 years is long enough to wait for a sequel. So we got one
Beetlejuice Squared stars Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder and Catherine O'Hara again, but the rest of the original cast is missing. As the movie begins, a family tragedy brings O'Hara and Ryder back to the house they lived in when Beetlejuice was haunting. This actually takes a long time to happen, though, with about 20 minutes of setup that was fine, but not too interesting.
But then things start to get weird, as per the usual when Tim Burton directs a movie, and it turns into a full-on Beetlejuice movie.
Do you want to see people who died in weird circumstance again? You got it!
Do you want to see a (too long) musical number where Beetlejuice possesses people to make them sing and dance? This is Burger King, baby, so you can have it your way!
Do you want a moody goth-esque teen, played by Jenna Ortega who was in the show Wednesday? You're a lucky little boy or girl!
There are ghosts. There are hijinks. Souls get sucked out of bodies. Chopped up bodies re-form. Sandworms appear (but not like the ones in Dune). And there's a forced wedding scene.
It is, to put it bluntly, a sequel to Beetlejuice. And if you liked the first one, you'll like this one. I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll leave it there.
The movie is PG-13, which I assumed was for creepy scares, but actually I think it also is because of the language. There's a fair bit of swearing, including two F-words, but since a movie gets an R rating if there's more than one F-word, the second one is beeped out. I think they thought that was clever, but it's just vulgarity for vulgarity's sake, in my opinion. The movie would have been better without it.
The original Beetlejuice has a soft spot in my heart because when we were dirt poor, my mom scraped together enough money to take us kids. That was in the time when the three of us would share a nugget meal at McDonald's because we were so broke. But the day she took us to Bettlejuice I found $10 on the ground in the mall and it was like I had won the lottery. She let me pick out a toy (a Pegasus from Clash of the Titans) and probably used the rest for popcorn.
Some things never change. Beetlejuice hasn't changed much in 30 years. And you know what? That's cool with me. I enjoyed the sequel quite a bit.
