“The juice is loose.”
Uttering these words from atop a table in his striped suit and moldy green hair stands none other than the ghost with the most, the end-all-be-all of the undead, the impish demon known as Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton). Say his name three times, and he’s back on the big screen after 36 years.
In all its idiosyncratic chaos (and with a few sour notes), “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice,” which opened in theaters Sept. 6, makes for an exciting and delightfully Tim Burton watch as Keaton dances across the screen with plenty of lewd jokes and macabre party tricks, and Winona Ryder dons her iconic blood-red wedding dress once again.
The movie’s acting shines even when the writing does not. Ryder embodies trembling adult Lydia Deetz, now a mini-celebrity with her own talk show titled “Ghost House With Lydia Deetz.” She’s traumatized and paranoid, which makes sense for a woman who almost had a marriage with an undead prankster freak forced upon her at the ripe age of 15. Ryder’s portrayal remains just as convincing and enjoyable as the 1988 original.
But the movie’s real scene-stealer is Catherine O’Hara, playing Lydia’s delicate stepmother Delia Deetz — a brutally untalented performance artist with an inflated ego and remarkable emotional neediness. O’Hara wrings her hands, primps her hair, and delivers surprising wit that gets a laugh from the audience with nearly every line.
One of the film’s notable weaknesses comes in the form of Astrid Deetz (Jenna Ortega), Lydia’s eye-rolling and rebellious daughter. Astrid is meant to be charmingly morbid, a gothic oddball who dances to her own rhythm with a side of precocious intelligence. We see her stapling global warming awareness fliers to her school’s bulletin board that read “Wake Up, We’re Toast” and dressing up as Marie Curie (already in the late stages of radiation poisoning) for Halloween. It’s intended to be adorable, but her witty humor comes across as derivative at best, obnoxious at not-so-best, and dips its toes into misogynistic at worst — when a group of girls at school prank her by swinging a fake ghost in her face as she enters a room, she turns and snaps, “When you all are on your third kid and second husband, we’ll see who has the last laugh.” Real zinger, huh?
Several of the movie’s many subplots seem to have been invented out of thin air or at the last minute. One example is Beetlejuice’s undead bride Dolores (Monica Bellucci), first seen reattaching her chopped-up limbs with a staple gun before going on a rampage to find her ex-husband. She was not mentioned a single time in the first movie, and even in her extremely flattering dress and full face, it’s tough to be convinced she fits in.
Going in, I wondered if anything could ever stack up to the original — and of course, the answer is no. But this movie shouldn’t be trapped within the shadow of the first. Even with many of the flaws that Hollywood sequels often have, “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice” has a nostalgic familiarity and deftly reworks many vintage elements — and actors that are now much older — to create an edgy and hilarious trip back into the underworld.
