Beetlejuice Beetlejuice review: These ghouls just want to have fun - shame the film is a mess! writes BRIAN VINER
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12A, 104 mins)
Verdict: Mediocre Mediocre
Tim Burton's 1988 film Beetlejuice was a comedy-horror classic, which, to paraphrase the title of one of that decade's best-known songs, showed some ghouls just want to have fun.
But Beetlejuice was very much of its time: a camp, vampy, Reagan-era mickey-take of yuppies and consumerism.
Hard as they strain to imbue this sequel with the same spirit (and spirits), Burton and his screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar don't really pull it off.
Winona Ryder, who was still in her teens when she appeared in the original, reprises her role as Lydia Deetz.
The teenage goth is a middle-aged widow now, a distant mother to moody Astrid (Jenna Ortega) and host psychic on a popular TV show called Ghost House, which is produced by her creepy boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux).
Hard as they strain to imbue this sequel with the same spirit (and spirits), Burton and his screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar don't really pull off Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Winona Ryder (left), who was still in her teens when she appeared in the original, reprises her role as Lydia Deetz
After Lydia learns from her stepmother Delia (Catherine O'Hara, another 1988 original, pictured) that her father has been eaten by a shark, the family gathers for the funeral back in the picture-postcard New England town of Winter River
Jenna Ortega, Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder starring in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Pictured: Willem DaFoe in a scene from 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice'
Actress Jenna Ortega starring in a scene from 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice'
After Lydia learns from her stepmother Delia (Catherine O'Hara, another 1988 original) that her father has been eaten by a shark, the family gathers for the funeral back in the picture-postcard New England town of Winter River.
But in the meantime, on the other side of the grave, Betelgeuse (pronounced Beetlejuice and extravagantly played once again by Michael Keaton) has designs on the grown-up Lydia who, you might remember, he tried to trick into marrying him all those decades ago — in the days when nobody raised much of an eyebrow at a lustful older man, even a dead one, preying on a schoolgirl as a premise for comedy.
Just as he did in 1988, Burton has oodles of fun with the great hereafter. The Afterlife Call Centre is staffed by a motley collection of spooks, while a deceased actor (Willem Dafoe) playing the part of a detective (a recurring joke that recurringly falls flat) runs the Afterlife Crime Unit.
He instructs his wraiths to 'leave no gravestone unturned' in pursuit of the woman Betelgeuse actually did end up marrying, the psychotic leader of a soul-sucking death cult called Delores (Monica Bellucci), who now wants him back.
While all this is going on, young Astrid takes a shine to a nice boy, Jeremy (played by Arthur Conti, Tom Conti's grandson); but of course nothing in Winter River is quite as it seems and before long she too is tottering on the precipice of the great beyond.
The cast of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice at the 81st Venice International Film Festival on August 28
A screengrab from the 1988 film Beetlejuice directed by Tim Burton
Michael Keaton in the original film Beetlejuice from 1988
As Astrid, Ortega gives a very appealing performance — and while the wildly successful Netflix series Wednesday, a spin-off from The Addams Family, made her a small-screen star, this film, following her appearances in three of the Scream slasher movies, should cement her stardom on the silver screen.
She might want to branch out from the kicking-the-bucket genre, but I guess that's up to her.
In its favour, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice lasts a sensible hour and 44 minutes and a lively retro soundtrack includes the Bee Gees singing Tragedy as well as a fabulously silly sequence set to the Jimmy Webb classic MacArthur Park.
But the picture lacks coherence, too often feeling more like an assembly of random macabre ideas from Burton's undeniably fertile mind.
Out in cinemas now.
A sensitive take on death ...in Venice
A twinkling firmament of stars illuminated the 81st Venice Film Festival, including George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, although there were a lot of anxious functionaries making sure that the paths of the couple formerly known as Brangelina never crossed.
As for the on-screen drama, it has been led by the scintillating Joker: Folie A Deux (12A, 138 mins), reviewed yesterday; and The Room Next Door (110 mins), from the great Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodovar.
His English-language debut stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in what is mostly a two-hander.
Swinton plays Martha, a former war correspondent with terminal cancer. Ingrid (Moore) is an old pal who hasn't seen her for years, but after they re-ignite their friendship, Martha pops an unusual question.
Still from Pedro Almodavar film The Room Next Door starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton
Swinton plays Martha, a former war correspondent with terminal cancer. Ingrid (Moore) is an old pal who hasn't seen her for years, but after they re-ignite their friendship, Martha pops an unusual question
The film is a meditation on death and the ethics of assisted dying
The film is not exactly joyous, but intelligent, sensitive and superbly acted
She has sourced a euthanasia pill on the so-called dark web and, having rented a house in upstate New York, wants Ingrid to join her on her final journey and to be in 'the room next door' on whatever night she chooses to die.
The film is a meditation on death and the ethics of assisted dying. So not exactly joyous, but intelligent, sensitive and superbly acted.
I also liked The Order (114 mins), Justin Kurzel's formulaic but watchable thriller, based on the true story of a murderous neo-Nazi group in 1980s America, and the fight to bring them to justice.
Jude Law is excellent as the maverick FBI agent tracking down the ringleader, played by Nicholas Hoult.
I was less fond than some of Maria (124 mins), about the celebrated diva Maria Callas in the last weeks of her life, but it has a mighty star turn by Jolie in the title role.
And Daniel Craig is fantastic in Queer (135 mins), Luca Guadagnino's racy adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novel, an autobiographical story of a dissolute gay man living in 1950s Mexico City.
Jude Law's back — in a fat suit fit for a king
By LARUSHKA IVAN-ZADEH
It's official: Jude Law is back. Hot off the seven-minute standing ovation he received at Venice for his new film, The Order, Law is sensationally repellent here as fat-padded Henry VIII in Firebrand (15, 120 mins).
Sadly, this Tudor drama doesn't possess the same gusto.
Alicia Vikander co-stars as Henry's final wife, Katherine Parr, forced to deploy her considerable intelligence to keep her head, literally, in the face of scheming courtiers (led by Simon Russell Beale) and the whims of a tyrannical, ailing husband.
Based on Elizabeth Fremantle's novel Queen's Gambit, the meagre story takes a cavalier attitude to historical accuracy, and fails to capitalise on its terrific ensemble cast, which also includes Eddie Marsan, Erin Doherty and Sam Riley — sporting a very silly stick-on beard.
Jude Law is sensationally repellent here as fat-padded Henry VIII in Firebrand
Jude Law as Henry VIII starred alongside Alicia Vikander as Katherine Parr
There's something nasty lurking not in the woodshed, but under the meadow in homegrown folk horror Starve Acre (15, 98 mins).
Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark give it their all as a 1970s couple who move to a remote Yorkshire farmhouse in hope of giving their son a better life. No spoiler to say they regret it.
Daniel Kokotajlo's follow-up to 2017's Apostasy is a masterfully eerie mood piece rooted in grief and barely buried folklore. Watch out for the zombie hare — it's the stuff of Easter nightmares.
Red Rooms (18, 118 mins) is a chilly and chilling French-language Canadian psychological thriller.
A fashion model (a compelling Juliette Gariepy) becomes obsessed with the trial of a serial killer (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), who has been accused of kidnapping, torturing and murdering teenage girls, then posting his horrific actions as pay-per-view snuff movies on the dark web.
An unsettlingly detached examination of why people are drawn to such things (as voyeurs or true-crime groupies) and the effects it has on them, it also begs the question of why we should pay to watch a film about it.
