Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Sometimes they come back...and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Maybe Beetlejuice (the original movie) was an unlikely suspect to rise from its grave—it seemed like it had said all that it had to say—but no, there apparently were a few more characters left to carve onto that gravestone. It probably helped immensely that a) many of the original principals needed work, and could use an old standby to serve as a seed for something new, and b) the success of Wednesday and its young star Jenna Ortega (who is in serious danger of being forever typecast) provided source material for an injection of new life to the older work. Merge the two influences and voila, a revival arrives, bringing much of the sensibility of the original, if not quite its freshness, while adding enough touches of today to make something that can stand on its own terms. Much of the narrative here works as a slow build, not unlike the first entry, until at last the applied touches coalesce into a climax that is genuinely funny, well brought together, and satisfying in its resolution of the various plot lines. The whole story put together may be something not quite what a fan of the first flick, or of Tim Burton in general, might expect at first glance, but if you let yourself get into the ... um ... spirit of the thing, you’ll find yourself feeling like the effort was not a dead waste of time. One suspects, given the rule of saying the name three times, that a follow up will be on the way; the vote here says that enough was done this time around to make that possibility one that does not need to remain buried—though these characters could also go to their rest without it being a tragedy, either. Ultimately, I guess you can’t begrudge anyone grabbing whatever kind of afterlife they can.