Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

This movie is even more chaotic than its prequel.

Spoiler warning for Beetlejuice and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Plot

The plot is all over the place, the movie is about like 10 separate things:

Beetlejuice’s ex-wife is hunting him

She was the leader of a soul-sucking cult while alive, married then poisoned Beetlejuice but before Beetlejuice died he killed her with an axe.

Charles died and that starts some of the plot(s) kind of.

Because of his dead the Deetz family returns to the Winter River house. He was probably written out because they couldn’t hire the actor that played him in the original as Jeffrey Jones is a sex offender¹. Also his death scene was made in claymation where the plane crashes and he gets eaten by a shark.

Lydia is getting married to her boyfriend Rory

Lydia has a paranormal show and her manager and boyfriend Rory asks to marry her during Charles’ wake, which shows that he is either extremely dumb and stupid or a really big douche, later in the movie we find out that it is the second.

Astrid, Lydia’s daughter, almost gets her life taken away

Astrid meets a boy in Winter River who she falls in love with but eventually finds out that he is a ghost. He tricks her into trading her life for his but thankfully Beetlejuice just solves it by sending him to hell and that plot point is just entirely wrapped up.

Beetlejuice is still trying to marry Lydia

After Lydia finds out that the house she dropped Astrid off was the house of a boy who murdered his two parents she quickly rushes to the house but she is too late, so she asks Beetlejuice for help. Beetlejuice makes a contract with her to get married after they save Astrid and they go on an adventure through the afterlife.

Charles is trying to find his way in the afterlife

Charles, having no head because the top half is just a shark bite is just around the afterlife while all this is happening, nothing really interesting happens with him but we occasionally cut to him.

And all these plot lines are alternating and stuff.

Characters

Delores

Delores

Danny Devito as a janitor

Delores is introduced in a very cool way where she is stapling herself to be whole and then she kills a janitor played by Danny Devito. After that she is in the movie from time to time to eventually get eaten by a sandworm. She was not a very important character at all, but she was definitely in the movie that much can be said.

Beetlejuice

Beetlejuice

Beetlejuice is put more central in this movie, all of the plot lines involve him in some way or another. He does his normal shenanigans with being a demonic ghost that’s trying to marry Lydia to get back to life. In this movie he is apparently has an office or something it is confusing what he does exactly but it is not important. Also, Michael Keaton plays Beetlejuice, the same actor that played him in the original movie in 1988. This is the case for most of the key characters and it is wonderful that they made that happen.

Delia

Delia Deetz

Delia is also in this movie as a pretty successful artist, she plays the same character as in the first movie, except less annoying. She is not this movie very much but because her character has become a lot more mellow that makes sense. She does however eventually die because she had some adders that killed her because she thought their fangs where pulled.

Astrid

Astrid Deetz

She’s not a very important character but she is in the movie, played by Jenna Ortega, who was not born when the original was released. She is a student who is also an avid environmentalist, she meets the boy who is a ghost, gets her life taken away, and gets her life back. Her relationship with her mother is also very rocky because she doesn’t believe in ghosts in the beginning and thinks her mother is a hack. In short: a typical person to be honest, apart from the whole “trusting a ghost you just met”-thing.

Lydia

Lydia Deetz

Lydia has a show, as I already said, apart from that she is almost exactly the same character except she is less depressed. At the end of the movie she has a really weird dream² where at first I was like: why did they do this? They kind of ruined it, but then it quickly became clear that it is just as absurd as the rest of the movie. With a child Beetlejuice being born from Astrid and then Lydia seeing Beetlejuice again it becomes clear that they could very well make another movie in 40 years or maybe even earlier, who knows?

Bob

Bob

Bob is THE MOST IMPORTANT character in the entire movie, he is THE GREATEST person compared to anyone, dead or alive. He is more influential than the President of the United States, he is more popular than Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran and Danny Devito combined. He is smarter than Einstein could even dream of being, he is more powerful than Arnold Schwarzenegger and more handsome than Tom Holland. He truly is the most powerful and bestest character in all of fiction. If he were to face Goku, Superman and Arceus at the same time he would not even bat an eye before wiping them all out of existence. He does get his soul sucked out in the movie by Delores sadly, and I will never ever ever forgive her.

Thoughts

All in all, a very enjoyable movie. It was absurd, chaotic and completely bonkers but that is exactly what makes it so fun. And that it is so faithful to the original is also amazing. It feels like the movie could have come out a few years after the original, instead of 40 and I don’t know why they didn’t make the movie sooner but now I got to watch the movie and get into the Beetlejuice universe. Because if it came out in like 1990 I probably wouldn’t have known about it, but now I do and I love it!

Footnotes

1. Taken from Jeffrey Jones Doesn’t Return in Beetlejuice Sequel After His Controversy. Here’s How the Movie Includes His Character ↩︎

2. Watch the ending scene here: Ending Scene BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE (2024) Movie CLIP HD ↩︎