‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ is a Solid Slice of Fan Service
metroweekly.comBeetlejuice was, in essence, a slyly original movie about ghosts who are stuck in a kind of purgatory. So it’s fitting that a long-gestating sequel to the 1988 classic has been seemingly trapped in development hell as long as the titular bio-exorcist has been, well, dead.Nixed screenplays with titles like “Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian” and “Beetlejuice in Love” have come and gone; the original screenwriters have passed into heaven’s waiting room; Alec Baldwin has long since aged out of playing 30-year-old hunks; and Tim Burton has spent decades teasing the possibility of a sequel while occupied with more pressing projects like, uh… Dumbo.Now, thirty-six years after Beetlejuice became a morbid hit — a gap equal to the passage of time between Citizen Kane and Star Wars — the aptly titled Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is finally shake, shake, shaking into theaters.
And no, it doesn’t hold a severed head to the original. But this lifelong Beetlejuice obsessive is happy to report that it is a solid slice of fan service, and about as good as a big-studio legacy sequel gets these days.In large degree, that’s because it works as a high-octane highlight reel for Tim Burton, now 66, whose career has flagged in recent years, but whose oft-imitated, Halloween-core aesthetic is in full bloom here.
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