Beetlejuice again resumed the satanic sense of humor, bloody miracles, and so to say, breathtaking special effects of the cult movie. To be fair, the sequel doesn’t measure up to 1988’s standards because people miss the union of the cast nature and the wow-nee plot, which most likely isn’t realistic. The new supporting characters are hit or miss. Willem Dafoe’s B-movie cop threatens to be overly entertaining, whereas goth-tastic Monica Bellucci’s bloodsucking femme fatale and young Jenna Ortega’s tired Halloween-wednesday impersonation lack substance. At least I am glad that deep down nasty Michael Keaton, immaculate Catherine O’Hara and Tim Burton still remain weird and genius.
Lydia Deetz (Ryder) most definitely sees ghosts and has even turned this ability into a lucrative business on a spook-themed talk show. Rory (Justin Theroux), her overattentive boyfriend and TV executive, is persistent in bringing new visions to the table. Astrid (Ortega), her nonbeliever daughter, wants to bury him and calls her mother a phony. If she is really capable of so much, why can she not imagine a facsimile of Astrid’s father present in the room to meet her?
Lydia Deetz’s step-mother and the now popular performance artist, Delia O’Hara, tells her over the phone excruciating news about her dearly cherished husband. Her husband Charles Deetz died in a plane crash. All of the members of his family must make it to the family house in Winter River, Connecticut for him to be buried. We gather up Astrid at the boarding center and move off to the haunted ‘Ghost House’ which made some of Lydia’s fame. The sight makes her uncomfortable as it brings back adolescent memories and the mischievous demon that lived in some of them.
But for Betelgeuse (Keaton), who has not given up on Lydia even after all these years and the afterlife waits for their reunion, he still wants to have children with Lydia yet still run away from the honey and back to the living world. He finds the Deetz family within his rotten jaws and smells a chance for deception. But other apparitions also have dastardly plans, and there’s also his angry ex-wife, Delores (Monica Bellucci), and a newcomer (Arthur Conti) apparently.
Beetlejuice has to be seen as part of the requirements of watching the sequel. Newbies will benefit in that respect but they are not completely lost again thanks to the prolific writting dyad Alfred Gough and Miles Millar of Smallville, into the badlands, spiderman 2 who do not take too long in recapping the first film. The importance of nostalgia is all too apparent in the use of familiar sets and sight gags as well as returning monsters and ghosts such as Shrunken Head Bob. So too are Delia’s painfully funny bad artworks but most wearing a carnival throughout the movie. If you did not understand what they were, they would simply be an odd assortment of non homogenous artifacts. Which I find quite unfortunate for it contains Taiwan general control, a reenacting of sorts very central to every other hand band for the deceased.
Such things invariably multiply because the chasm between Lydia and Astrid forces both of them to error. It is rather a revenge of sorts for her as a parent, after bringing Delia the same amount of hell. Tasks such as spend time with him or try his childhood, were spent well by striking the balance with some of the film’s great scenes of Delia boasting about the fact that the tables have turned. That parental instinct is there deep within Lydia even though she can’t coordinate with her offspring on many levels. This changes dramatically once Astrid fully understands that it’s not a lie on Lydia’s part. There’s a thin vein of heartfelt sadness in which Astrid is still wrestling with how to come to terms with her father not being in the picture anymore. Lydia is curious as to why she is unable to visualize his presence. Identify with this, provided the dramatic showdown, which takes far too long given that the run time of the film is relatively short at 1hr 44mins, happens to be pleasant.
Some of that sheer despondency and hideousness when boy crazy has to be in Ortega’s hit Netflix show Wednesday as well as the burden of the movies. She does not have a cutting edge personality on pigtails but the similarities of the characters are quite unfortunate. Ortega is, more or less, a toned down version of the snarky into The Addams Family. She’s fine in this one, but Astrid should have had some other aspects of personality instead of the Wednesday-adolescent girl version. In this part, Ortega is an industrious rather amazing actress but she is in danger of being typecast in this one.
In this sequel, the nightmare continues as Beetlejuice Beetlejuice tries to search for a new villain that he/she/it will have to fight. Bellucci, the raven-haired Sally equivalent from Burtons ‘The Night Before Christmas’, disappears in the second act completely. She is presented as one more deranged killer who sips the souls of the living, but then plays Betelgeuse seek and hide after failing to locate him. He is mad, but there’s no reason for it. Delores has no limits and moves from whiskey to whiskey and finally to her beloved man when the story reaches its peak. Was this character necessary? Or did Mike prefaced that she wanted Sally acted as a human rather than a doll? No idea, but she has a very cool costume design.
Wolf Jackson the Aztec’s Return to the dead. This is the turning point of the new film. One of the strengths of this movie is how much laughing Dafoe manages to provoke the audience during Wolf instead of absorbing himself in the role. Dafoe doesn’t aim for a serious mood, risking to look ridiculous. Indisputably, the best option would be retaining Ryder and Ryder’s strengths which are clear in how they save the film with great entertaining performances – the script is as dreary as each of the secondary characters until the leads sprinkle some magic dust on it. What Is What, of the second film, follows the action-comedy tone used in the first film. Having seen enough of cult films and heroes, she is in love with them. How come Lydia is not nice support, go on?
Beckon can be accused of the fact that he often holds on to old snags of saleable goods and mumbles fresher things in detail. However, this is precisely what information wants and accepts in this case the audience. Jurassic Park was a fascinating view of a movie. It seems like this continuation uses the same tricks which already were proved to work. Certainly, Danny Elfman and his wonderful music take center so to speak. Unfortunately, the only distance of the picture that works to the bottom is Rory Theroux, a dull and predictable character designed for repetition.
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