Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

            Hello and welcome back to another week here at Mindless Movie Reviews. I’m so happy to announce that I was able to check out the Ghost with the Most, as I teased last week. Was Beetlejuice Beetlejuice all over the place? Yes, it was. Was this movie weird, crazy, and messed up? Yes. Did I enjoy the hell out of it? Yes, I did.  I will dive more into it in just a few, but before I do, I must warn you that this article has spoilers, spoilers, spoilers. So, if you don’t want to conjure them up, I would stop here and return when you are ready. In the meantime, head over to my homepage to see what else is waiting for you.

            For the rest of you ghouls, let’s sink our teeth into my thoughts on this long-awaited sequel from the great Tim Burton. The movie starts in the most appropriate way possible… death. Charles Deetz has died. Jeffrey Jones’ Deetz has perished via a shark attack after a plane crash (which we get a classic Burton stop-animation to illustrate this). This brings Lydia (Winona Ryder) and Delia (Catherine O’Hara) back to Winter River to mourn and bury his remains.

            In the years since we’ve seen part one, Lydia is now the host of a TV show where she investigates ghosts. She is also in some sort of relationship with her boss/manager Rory (Justin Theroux). She also now has a daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega). Even through the strained connection, Astrid arrives at Winter River with the rest of them and soon finds herself not wanting to be around her mom. She still misses her dad and doesn’t like the way Lydia is living her life.

            Now that Lydia is back where it all started, her visions of Beetlejuice (once again brilliantly played by Michael Keaton) are starting to ramp up. While Lydia’s life up here is being shaken up, down in Beetlejuice’s world, his ex-wife, Delores (Monica Bellucci) is back and looking for revenge. After a pretty hilarious backstory (with subtitles and everything), Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe) makes his appearance. It’s hard not to like Dafoe in anything he does and his rendition of an actor who was a cop now acting like a cop in the afterlife is just amazing. So over-the-top and it hits all the right spots.

                The two worlds finally meet and mix up when Astrid mistakenly trusts a boy (Arthur Conti) she didn’t know was a ghost. He tricks her into trading lives, so Lydia’s only hope is to summon Mr. Juice himself. Once again, she agrees to marry him in exchange for helping Astrid and he goes right to work. Personally, I think this is where the movie starts to take off. The crazy, funny, and surprises at every turn start to smack you in the face almost too fast to keep up. I loved the mayhem, but think the setup to get here took a little long, after all, we already knew most of the main characters before we started watching.

            Wolf Jackson is hot on the trail of Delores as Beetlejuice is hot on the trail of another scheme to get out of the afterlife and back to the world of the living. Along the way, we get lots of fan service (which I’ve always been on board for) with clay motion sandworms, a multitude of shrunken-head guys (poor Bob), the handbook for the recently deceased, and of course the waiting room where the newly dead go to wait. At one point Astrid even gets to see her dad again.

            As the stories all start to head towards a collision, our focus shifts over to the church where Lydia is supposed to be marrying Rory (even though she really doesn’t want to). After some more Beetlejuice fun, the sadness of realizing Delia really is dead now, and a little too-long musical number around a giant cake we get our resolution. Both Delores and Rory (who had been lying to Lydia) get taken down the same way Beetlejuice does in the original… giant sandworm and Beetlejuice himself is history (literally popped like a balloon). What is there left to do?

            Delia and Charles reunite and board the soul train to the afterlife. Lydia has a dream about her and Astrid, and the disturbing Beetlejuice baby makes a final appearance. But the big question is… what in the world happened to all those shrunken-head guys that got loose?

            In the end, this was chaotic fun with characters I’ve loved for 36 years. It was fun to see them on screen again and Burton did it in a way that feels like it was fair to those same characters. If you are a fan of the original movie, I think you should and will like it. If you never watched the first one or didn’t like it, you may have some trouble understanding this or even enjoying it. But, like I’ve said for multiple paragraphs now, I am a huge Beetlejuice fan and I like what he did with the story. I give this a 7 out of 10!!!

            What are your thoughts? Have you seen it yet? Are you a fan of Tim Burton? Let me know in the comments below. I love doing this and it’s so much more fun if we can interact together.             Thanks and join me next week for another mindless movie review of some sort.