Beetlejuice Beetlejuice does the thing most of these 30 years later sequels fail to do. At its core, this feels like they could’ve wrapped on the first Beetlejuice movie last month, or last year even. It rolls right into it.

I’m beside myself. Me and Mrs. Know-It-All saw the movie, and it’s a ride. It’s a little over an hour and a half, like an hour and 45 minutes, and they pack so much into it that I was blown away.

I’m going to spoil this, by the way. This isn’t a non-spoiler review, so if that’s what you came for, go someplace else.

Lydia, Thirty Years On

The movie begins with Lydia Deetz, and she’s hosting a show called Ghost House. They do the whole move up through the town thing during the title credits, and it’s great, very reminiscent of the first one. In the original it was the model. In this one it’s the model sometimes, and then there are actual people walking in the street and cars in the road, so I’m not really sure which was which. Either way, it was a lot of fun. She’s in the attic, except the attic is a set.

Winona Ryder does an amazing job playing the older, jaded Lydia, and they call her out for it several times. Where’s that little goth girl? That’s the one thing I had to realize with Lydia: I really wanted to see where she had gone and what happened.

They call back the Maitlands, which is just to say that according to Lydia they found a loophole and moved on. That’s all we get, and that’s okay.

We’re introduced to Astrid, her daughter, and reintroduced to Catherine O’Hara as Delia, her stepmother. You also find out, strangely enough, that Lydia’s real biological mother apparently is still alive somewhere, which we’ve never talked about once. But Lydia and Delia have clearly reconciled to some extent. They’ve come to terms with who they were and where they are now. Delia is this crazy artist person. Imagine the character she was, taken to its Nth degree. It’s beyond insane how she’s evolved into that person.

How You Lose an Actor and Keep the Character

Lydia gets a phone call while filming her show, and it’s her mother telling her that her father is dead. Obviously Jeffrey Jones, who played the original Charles Deetz, isn’t in this one.

Salty pointed this out when I was talking to him about it. They didn’t do what they did with Bishop, or Ash, in Alien, where you CGI the character back. They simply said, okay, he dies. What you get is this really interesting flashback of how he died, and it reminds me of those old claymation commercials from back in the 90s. He died in the ocean, bitten by a shark.

So in the Netherworld, when he shows up, he’s not whole. (I call it the Netherworld because I was a fan of the cartoon back in the day.) It’s just this bite out of a person walking around, and you hear a version of his voice, so you can get away with it. It was brilliant. I sat there going, that is so smart.

It’s one of the few times a sequel hits all the right things. The town looks identical, which is crazy.

Keaton Hasn’t Lost a Step

Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice, out the gate, sells it. I was worried he was going to look old, and yes, there are lines. But his tone hasn’t changed. His delivery hasn’t changed. He inhabits the character in a ridiculously amazing way.

Lydia is in a relationship with her manager, Rory, played by Justin Theroux. He’s sort of the analog for the really eccentric guy from the first one, Otho, played by Glenn Shadix. I say analog because he’s about as much of a cartoon as you could possibly get.

They introduce a ton of new lore. There’s a new person working behind the counter in the office, and they still do the numbers thing. Beetlejuice is apparently working in the Netherworld as a ghost you reach out to for help, a haunter for hire. He has all the little shrunken head guys working for him, including Bob, who I guess is the original one, and they’re all in these yellow, very Century 21 looking jackets.

The Villain the Movie Barely Needs

Then there’s Delores, who Monica Bellucci plays, and with her we get an origin story for Beetlejuice. They dropped the scene online, so you can literally search it out and see it. The idea is that he was a grave robber and she was part of a witch’s coven that does sacrifices to take your soul and live forever. Her origin is so incidental and sidebarred that it doesn’t matter. His is the far more fascinating one to have seen. She poisons him, and before he dies he takes an axe and chops her into bits and pieces.

She comes back through dumb luck, and that’s probably the only thing that I felt was really contrived. Danny DeVito has a cameo as the new janitor in that crazy hallway. He’s blue faced, he drinks Drano, the whole nine yards. While he’s using the waxing machine he bumps a shelf, and it knocks over the boxes where all of Delores’s parts are kept. Very reminiscent of the patchwork doll lady in The Nightmare Before Christmas, she puts herself back together. Gets a staple gun and staples herself whole. She sucks the soul out of Danny DeVito’s guy, and then she goes looking for Beetlejuice.

Then the Netherworld police get involved. Enter Willem Dafoe’s Wolf Jackson. Wolf Jackson was an actor in life, and the biggest role he ever had was playing a cop. While he was playing that cop he wanted to be real, be genuine, keep it real, and he jumps on a live grenade without realizing it’s a live grenade. It kills him. So now he’s here, and he’s become a ghost cop, if you will.

The One Relationship That Felt Lopsided

Astrid is Jenna Ortega’s character, and she hates her mother. This is probably one of the only relationships that felt extraordinarily lopsided for me. They don’t give us sufficient reasons.

Lydia’s ex, Astrid’s father, is played by Santiago Cabrera. Those of you who watch Star Trek: Picard will remember him. He died, and Lydia, being this medium now, can’t see or talk to him. So Astrid thinks her mother’s a fraud. Thinks everything she does is fake. Doesn’t believe in any of this stuff, because apparently they never once went up into the attic.

If there are any story shortcomings for me, it’s stuff like that, those little holes that make you go, eh, really? But the movie is so much fun that you don’t actually care. Remember what I’ve always said: a fun movie forgives an awful lot of sins. This movie is no different. There are a ton of sins in this movie. You don’t care, because it’s just that good and you’re having a heck of a time. Michael Keaton is pitch perfect, still.

The Kid in the Tree House

They all go back to the town where the house is for Charles’s funeral. During it, Rory decides he wants to marry Lydia and puts her on the spot. There’s this whole big angry thing, Astrid says this is ridiculous, and she leaves. Not really running away. She just gets on her bike and goes.

She slams into a tree at a tree house, and there’s a young man up there. He comes down, they hit it off, and they’re going to go on a date for Halloween.

It turns out the kid is dead. The kid’s a ghost. I will gladly admit, because they did a wonderful job, that I didn’t see it coming. There’s probably a million and one of you in the Know-It-All Nation who saw it coming all day. Great. I didn’t, and I was blown away by it. When it’s revealed, you’re sitting there like, wait, what?

Say It Three Times

Since the beginning of the movie, Lydia keeps having these visions. Every now and again she’ll see somebody in a striped shirt, she sees Beetlejuice, and she’s very much of the mindset of, oh no, what’s going to happen? She apparently takes pills to help tamp down her ability to see dead people.

At some point she and Astrid are upstairs in the attic, and that’s when Astrid says the name. Lydia’s reaction is, are you crazy, don’t ever say that name. Astrid leaves, upset.

Then Rory shows up. He’s talking about how they’ve been to couples counseling, and he tells her he’s going to pull this Band-Aid off for her. And he says it. He says the dude’s name three times. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.

They’re in the model, and sure enough there’s a big electric sign. The floor drops out and they’re in front of him. Couples counseling. It’s crazy. That’s the scene you’ve seen where he spills his guts. So you immediately know he’s out.

The Trade, and the Soul Train

Lydia wants to leave. One thing leads to another, and the ghost kid tricks Astrid into going into the Netherworld. He lets her think she’s going to see her father, which, by the way, she totally is. But there’s a thing in the Handbook for the Recently Deceased that apparently lets you switch places. You can give your life so that this ghost can leave. He doesn’t tell her any of that.

Lydia gets there just in time to see it, and she realizes there’s only one solution. She calls on Beetlejuice. I need you to help me save my daughter. How do I know you’re going to keep your word? “I swear on my dead mother’s soul.”

“Bob, you and the boys stand guard. Nobody gets through.” So all the Century 21 shrunken head guys run out, and they’re all over town running crazy. It’s Halloween, so why not.

Meanwhile, Delia got herself a pair of vipers for a ceremony in Charles’s name. They’re supposed to be defanged. She gets bit by both of them and dies. Just two little bites, that’s it, so she looks perfect in the afterlife, and she’s freaking out, and she’s the biggest Karen in the afterlife you could ever ask for. It’s ridiculous.

Beetlejuice has never been cooler than when he’s helping them track this kid down, because all the kid has to do is get his stamp done. Meanwhile, Astrid is being carted to the Soul Train. Oh yeah. It was unreal, the music and the whole bit. In the credits they actually thank Don Cornelius’s estate. It’s wonderful.

Can Beetlejuice Send You to Hell?

The kid’s about to get his stamp. He’s standing there like, ha ha, it’s too late, and he looks at his passport. Beetlejuice goes boom, hits the button, and the kid goes straight down into hell.

Salty had a problem with that part. He said, are you trying to tell me Beetlejuice can just send people to hell?

Whoa. Time out. I don’t believe that was a result of Beetlejuice as much as it was a result of who Beetlejuice was pretending to be. He was pretending to be one of the passport people, and those are the ones who send you to the great beyond, or to hell and damnation, or to all the different places the Soul Train takes you. By virtue of where he was standing, I think that’s why he could do the thing. I don’t actually think he could do it because he’s Beetlejuice.

Sandworms, the Bee Gees, and a Church Full of Influencers

By the way, you do get sandworms, and they’re wonderful. They still look very much stop motion. Whether it’s CG made to look like stop motion or actual stop motion, I don’t know, but the aesthetic was great. The production design was brilliant. Everything looks like the Beetlejuice universe we all know and love.

The music in this is ridiculous. The Bee Gees have never sounded better, and there’s just so much good music.

Finally they end up at the church. There are tons of influencers, Rory’s there, and Beetlejuice gets them all sucked into their phones. That’s the end of them. Probably the best thing for influencers. Then he proceeds to sing this whole thing, and it is stupid cool. It’s unbelievable.

That’s when Delores shows up. Oh yeah. You thought I just didn’t talk about her. She’s that unimportant.

Beetlejuice uses his truth serum on Rory, and it comes out that he was literally just looking for someone who’s easy at a sorrow camp for grieving people. He was using Lydia to make money, and he’d make more money as her husband. Delores and Rory end up together, and they get eaten by a sandworm.

Beetlejuice tries to take everybody, and it’s kind of ridiculous. But Astrid, who’s brilliant, reads the actual handbook. (She does see her father, by the way. He helps them escape.) She can understand a lot of it because she has her mother’s abilities, and she says, yeah, no, this is a null and void contract. You can’t do the thing you did. They say the name, and he goes back to wherever he goes.

The Ending, and Why I Want a Third One

You then get this ending that shows Astrid and her mother going off to all the places Astrid and her father had wanted to go, including Dracula’s castle. Astrid falls in love with a guy, the whole nine yards. Then we’re in the future and she’s going to have a baby, and she gives birth to a Beetlejuice baby.

And then Lydia wakes up. It was a nightmare. Beetlejuice was there, but then he’s not. It’s very interesting.

I’m firmly of the mindset that they’re going to do another one, and I hope they do. I hope they do a third one, wrap the whole thing up, and do a great job with it, because this was brilliant. I’m really shocked by how good this movie was.

So there you go. Now you know, and if knowing is half the battle, you’re halfway to being a know-it-all yourself.

The Verdict

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a solid 8 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.

I enjoyed the pants off this. I thought it was really good. The little minor things are there, and don’t get me wrong, I think a 10 out of 10 would be ridiculous, because the first movie was easily a 10 out of 10. But this one is a very original premise for a sequel, and everybody’s firing on all thrusters and doing amazing work.

Salty and I were set to talk about nothing but this on Nerd Fight the next day, and it’s funny, I didn’t expect much fighting to go on. I think we both very much agree about how great and brilliant this thing is.

Never forget, everyone loves a know-it-all. I’d absolutely love to hear your thoughts and your take on it, so drop them in the comments on the video above.