Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Parent Guide

Thirty-six years after she first met a certain deranged ghost, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) has found a career running a supernatural talk show called Ghost House with her sleazy boyfriend/manager Rory (Justin Theroux). Worse, she’s seeing Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) all over the place.

Unbelievably, she has even bigger problems: Her father, Charles has died, and her stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) has called her back to the family home in Winter River. On the way, they pick up Lydia’s estranged daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) from school. Astrid has never believed her mother’s claims to be able to see the dead, and their relationship is strained, even on good days.

During the funeral, Astrid finds a scale model of the town in the attic and a pamphlet for a bioexorcist named Beetlejuice. When Lydia sees it, she begs Astrid never to say the name again, because if you say it three times, he appears. And once the Juice is loose, it’s not so easy to put him back…

Tim Burton is not famed for his subtle style, and this film is no exception. It’s just as bizarre, far-out, and macabre as the original, and I really enjoyed most of the film. Of course, I’ll watch Michael Keaton do just about anything, but he genuinely seems to be having some fun with the foul-mouthed, wise-cracking corpse, and the fun can be contagious. Good performances from the rest of the cast and a heck of a show-stopping musical number make this a respectable sequel to a film which needs no sequel.

That’s not to say the movie is flawless. It opens to a fantastic orchestral suite from composer Danny Elfman, but you don’t hear a lot of it after that. The film plays a lot more pop music than the original, and I wish it had stuck more to Elfman’s score. The bigger problem is the structure of the movie. It’s got at least one sub-plot too many, which makes it feel like you’re watching a TV show rather than a movie. That throws the pacing out of whack, and the film ends up being about fifteen minutes longer than it needs to be.

Parents, if you’ve seen the original film, you know what content issues you need to consider in this sequel. Beetlejuice is, by design, irreverent and crude, but you can also expect some remarkably graphic gore for a film at this rating. I’m not going into detail, but just for context, a side character who is killed by a shark in a Claymation cutscene is later seen wandering around the afterlife missing everything from the armpits up – and speaking through what’s left of his trachea which sticks comically out of his torso and spurts blood at whoever he’s talking to. It’s deliberately over-the-top, but gruesome nonetheless.

I’m still not convinced that this movie needed to be made. The original had such a unique, chaotic charm, and wrapped up its story so neatly that I think we probably should have just left it alone. It’s hard to be too upset with the result, though. The Ghost with the Most has still got plenty to give. I just hope we don’t keep digging him up. Let him go out on a high note.