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BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE

"Loopy Occult Shenanigans"

Content: -3 Excessive sex, violence, immorality, and/or worldview problems. (Sometimes excessive content such as violence is in otherwise redemptive movies.)
Entertainment Quality:
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Language
Violence
Sex
Nudity

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What You Need To Know:

Michael Keaton’s loony, deranged bio-exorcist from the Underworld returns in BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE. It’s another wild and crazy journey into the bizarre imagination of filmmaker Tim Burton. Winona Ryder also returns in this sequel. She plays Lydia, the now grown-up teenager from the first movie. Lydia reluctantly asks for Beetlejuice’s help in saving her skeptical daughter, Astrid, who’s been deceived into trading places with another evil ghost. Can they stop Astrid from taking the “Soul Train to the Great Beyond”?

BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE admittedly has some funny parts. One of the visual highlights is a lip-syncing rendition of the cheesy song “MacArthur Park.” It’s sung by the late British actor Richard Harris of the first two HARRY POTTER movies. Also, the mother is willing to sacrifice herself to save her daughter. However, the rest of the movie has a false, occult worldview. It also mocks some of the Christian, biblical tropes about the Afterlife. Finally, BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE has gruesome, bloody images of living corpses with mutilated body parts. Also, there’s a slightly excessive number of expletives, including five string profanities and an “f” word.

Content:

(OO, FRFR, AbAb, B, C, H, LLL, VVV, S, A, DD, MM):

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:
Strong occult worldview with false and bizarre ideas of the Afterlife and some mockery of Christian, biblical tropes about the Afterlife (it’s played for laughs, somewhat satirical, which may make a difference to some viewers), mitigated slightly by a mother trying to save her skeptical humanist teenage daughter from being tricked and trapped into the Underworld by the ghost of a murderer with demonic intentions, and the mother makes a deal with the loony and deranged title character, a centuries old ghost (at one point the character tries to make the Sign of the Cross but sets himself on fire), to get his help in saving her daughter, but they find a loophole at the end that breaks the deal, plus the climactic scene is set in a Christian church where a pastor tries to help, but he leaves when things get too rough and bizarre for him, a villain is shown falling into the fires of Hell, and the third act has two endings, with the first one being positive, but it’s followed by a negative ending that’s left unexplained and leaves an unsatisfying taste in one’s mouth;

Foul Language:
15 obscenities (including one “f” word and some “s” words), two profanities mentioning Jesus, three GD profanities, six light profanities, and one slightly bleeped “f” word;

Violence:
Extreme, sometimes gory and strong violence (often played for gruesome laughs) includes corpses missing bloody parts, two dream scenes where a small baby Beetlejuice is born out of a female’s body, the baby kills the doctor in one of those scenes, a living and walking corpse in the Underworld is missing the upper part of his body and his aorta sometimes spurts a little blood, a man’s living corpse has little fish biting away at his body, a dead woman staples her separated body parts together, a woman’s corpse has a mixer in her head, a man’s corpse has a small saw in his head, a woman’s corpse is still being eaten by her dead cats, and a character is bitten by poisonous snakes that were assumed to be defanged;

Sex:
A few off-color innuendoes and comments, plus some leering;

Nudity:
No explicit nudity, but some brief female cleavage;

Alcohol Use:
Brief alcohol use;

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:
No smoking but two people take what seems to be an anti-anxiety pill; and,

Miscellaneous Immorality:
Deceit and trickery and lying but often rebuked eventually, plus teenage girls play a practical joke on their classmate, and a stepmother is pretty self-absorbed.

More Detail:

Michael Keaton’s loony, deranged bio-exorcist from the Underworld returns in BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE, where Lydia, the now grown up teenage girl from the first movie, reluctantly asks for his help in saving her daughter, Astrid, who’s been deceived into trading places with the ghost of a murderer. Played for laughs and satire, BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE has a plot about a mother who’s willing to sacrifice herself for her daughter, but some of the movie’s serious parts are slow, and it’s rife with gruesome occult violence and false theology, with some unnecessary foul language.

As the sequel opens, Lydia Deetz, the Goth teenager young from the first movie, has returned to her Goth looks to become the host of an occult TV program about haunted places. Her husband died in a boating accident, and their teenage daughter, Astrid, is totally skeptical about her mother’s belief in ghosts. Also, Lydia’s engaged to her TV producer, Rory, who reeks of insincerity. What’s troubling Lydia most, however, is that she keeps seeing images of Beetlejuice.

Lydia gets a call from her stepmother, Delia, who’s still making horrible “Avant Garde” sculptures and paintings. Delia tells Lydia that her father, Charles, was in a shipwreck and got eaten by a shark.

So, Lydia grabs Astrid from school and takes her back to the family home in Winter River for the funeral two days before Halloween. During the funeral reception, Rory decides to ask Lydia to marry him on Halloween at midnight. She’s not quite ready to marry him, but she says yes.

Astrid doesn’t really like Rory. She wanders upstairs in the house and opens the attic door, which has been locked for years. She finds a new flyer from Beetlejuice offering his “services.” She starts to say his name three times like the flyer says, but Lydia appears and stops her. Lydia tells her to never say that name, and Astrid rolls her eyes.

Disgusted by her mother’s occult career and her step-grandmother’s craziness, Astrid decides to ride a bike around the town. She meets a teenage boy named Jeremy. The two start to fall for one another, but Jeremy has a terrible secret.

Soon, Astrid finds herself in Beetlejuice’s domain, riding on the Soul Train to “the Great Beyond.” In desperation, her mother calls on Beetlejuice to help her save Astrid. The price? Join Beetlejuice in the “Afterlife.”

As with the first movie, also directed by Tim Burton, BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE is filled with zany comical characters and situations. As the title character, Michael Keaton is allowed to go nuts. The problem is that, as with the first movie, some of his jokes are a bit crude. Also, some of the zany dead people are gruesomely disfigured, in a comical way. For example, the upper part of Lydia’s father, including his head and heart, is missing, with his aorta spouting an occasional little spurt of blood.

That said, some of the comedy is pretty funny. For example, one of the movie’s highlights is a lip-syncing scene involving the late British actor Richard Harris (of the first two HARRY POTTER movies) and his rendition of the cheesy song “MacArthur Park.” To those unfamiliar with the song, it has an infamous line about leaving a cake out in the rain. So, the movie has a giant wedding cake in a church with rain pouring down it, melting the icing. The movie’s idea of having people taking the Soul Train (from the 1970s music show) to Heaven (in this case, “the Great Beyond”) is also rather funny. Finally, another funny part is Willem Dafoe playing a dead action movie star who’s now a detective working for the underworld. He comes after Beetlejuice for bringing a living person, Lydia, into the Afterlife.

As noted above, the main BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE plot is about the mother, Lydia, willing to sacrifice herself for her daughter. The rest of the movie, however, has a false, occult worldview that mocks some of the Christian, biblical tropes about the Afterlife, including the Catholic concept of Purgatory or Limbo. Furthermore, although the third act has a positive resolution, it tacks on a dark, nightmarish epilogue that confusing, leaving an unsatisfying tone to everything. Also, the movie has some extreme, gory violence and gratuitous foul language, including a few strong profanities. So, media-wise moviegoers will find BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE unacceptable. It’s clearly not a must-see movie anyway. The pacing is not that well-crafted, and the acting and character development is a bit lacking.



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