Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, good as first one?

Oct 25, 2024 | Second Beetlejuice movie review. Deetz family returns home to Winter River. Will Beetlejuice come to haunt them again?

Beelejuice (1988) review

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice starts similarly to the first movie with an aerial shot and familiar music. We see a much older Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) hosting a TV show, “Ghost House.”
She suddenly sees Beetlejuice! oh, it’s someone else.

A little panicked, Lydia leaves the set and goes into the bathroom, where a woman is talking to Lydia and wait, there’s a knife through the woman’s head, so Lydia can still see ghosts.
Rory (Justin Theroux), her boyfriend and the show’s manager comes in and tries to comfort her, and yes, he is a little weird.

Lydia gets a call from her stepmother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara) who is crying in her art gallery. Her husband Charles, Lydia’s dad, is dead. (After a funny story), they decide to get Astrid (Jenna Ortega), Lydia’s daughter, and hold the funeral in Winter River.

We see Astrid disappointed in her mother’s job and her boyfriend (Astrid’s dad died while in the Amazon).

Now these four people are going to the home in Winter River, and what will happen there? Will Beetlejuice come to haunt them again?

The acting is good, nothing really bad. Michael Keaton (Beetlejuice) is phenomenal as usual. A notable mention is Willem Dafoe as Wolf Jackson; he has a short part but steals the show, super funny.

Story: When Beetlejuice tells how he met Delores (Monica Bellucci), the black-and-white scene in Italian is very good. As I said, Beetlejuice is very funny in many scenes.

But there are some things where the film suffers. You can see that they had to shift the story because of which actors are available. So much time has passed since the first movie, the actors have aged, and certain things are not possible in the story.
Delores (ex-wife of Beetlejuice) is introduced as menacing, but she didn’t get to do much in the film except for sucking souls and looking beautiful (her entry scene was very cool, though).

Also, Astrid’s father is dead, and Astrid and Lydia have emotional scenes about how Lydia can’t see him, but ghosts are bound to where they died. He died in the Amazon and was not found.
They don’t even know where specifically he died; how is she going to talk to him?

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice tries to be emotional sometimes, but it was never a strong/major part of the first movie and doesn’t fit the theme of the movie. But yes, they are small and brief parts, and the movie does not go all in on them.

Astrid’s father is punished as a civil servant in death, but they don’t even mention or talk about it? (Though there was a heading in The Afterlife: “Workers Wrongly Assigned Suicide at Death”)