Hollywood has a history of reanimating the decaying corpses of long-dead movies with belated sequels, so perhaps it was just a matter of time before somebody delved into the grave marked Beetlejuice. That someone was only ever going to be Tim Burton, director of the original 1988 film, and although discussions about a Beetlejuice sequel were reportedly under way for decades, Burton maintained that he would only consider it if Michael Keaton reprised the title role and any sequel remained faithful to the spirit of the morbidly eccentric original film. On both these counts, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice succeeds. As the prankster demon “bio-exorcist”, a suitably manic Keaton scuttles through the film like a giant cockroach in a striped suit, while the decaying DNA of the original picture is evident in every hyperstylised frame of the sequel.
Perhaps a little too much at times. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice teeters on the edge of the same pitfalls that scuppered the most recent Ghostbusters sequel: the sense that decades-old ideas have been dusted off, dressed up a little and passed off as new. Fortunately, what redeems Burton’s new film, at least to a certain extent, is the fact that those ideas were so wigged out and distinctive in the first place. Yes, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is derivative, but it’s also pleasingly idiosyncratic and rough around the edges. The director gets past the problem of a non-returning original cast member not with an AI reconstruction, but with a delightfully shonky, lo-fi claymation animated sequence that ends with the character’s face getting chewed off by a shark. Problem solved, Burton style.
