Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

I was a casual fan of the 1988 original, having regularly viewed the tamer TV adaptation before that. When I felt like going to a theater again, this sequel was the only feature to grab me. Ordinarily, I'd save its genre for next month, but that slipped my mind.

The decades have not been very kind to Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder). Her husband (Santiago Cabrera) died in an unlikely accident, and despite her success as a televised ghost whisperer, she hasn't been able to contact him. Disbelieving teen daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega, fresh off Wednesday) wants as little to do with her as possible. She still freaks out every time she sees someone wearing black and white horizontal stripes, rightly suspecting that the titular source of her PTSD (Michael Keaton) hasn't given up on coercing her hand in marriage so he can return full-time to the land of the living. In some ways, she has it together even less than her eccentric artist stepmother (Catherine O'Hara), who now reports that Lydia's father also died in an unlikely accident. At his wake, her unorthodox producer (Justin Theroux) aggressively talks her into an imminent Halloween wedding. And when Astrid gets involved with a local boy (Arthur Conti) who's not as harmless as he acts, Lydia fears that her worst nightmare has become her best hope.

Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985)

Despite being an acceptable age to have watched Pee-wee's Playhouse regularly in childhood, I never saw a complete episode. It didn't bother me; it just didn't draw me in much for whatever reason. By the time I knew about the innuendo catering to older viewers, it was long off the air. My main exposure to the character of Pee-wee Herman (as opposed to Paul Reubens in general) was Big Top Pee-wee, which, while panned, didn't bother me for one viewing either.

So why would I care enough to see another Pee-wee movie at this point? Well, an acquaintance called it Tim Burton's most underrated film (it was his first silver screen feature, so no wonder people rarely associate him with it), and I agreed with said acquaintance that Batman was his most overrated. Beyond that, people kept making reference to PwBA online, if only for one particular scene and a loose comparison to Bicycle Thieves. At 91 minutes, the last several of which I'd caught on TV once, it could serve as a pretty painless session in cultural education.

Triple Feature: ParaNorman, Frankenweenie, and Hotel Transylvania

Boy, the next movie I saw after Vampyr also had vampires but otherwise couldn't be more different if it tried. I considered reviewing HT on its own, but I had recently seen the other two participants in its Hollywood "duel" and felt like talking about them too. You may ask, "Why bother with comparisons instead of just reviewing a film on its own merits?" Well, not everyone has the resources to make watching all three feasible, so why not help weigh the options?

To qualify for a duel, movies need to come out around the same time with similar themes -- in this case, comical PG family animations focusing on the undead circa Halloween 2012. At present, PN and FW are exactly tied on both the Internet Movie Database and Rotten Tomatoes. HT does marginally better on IMDb but much worse on RT, as you might expect from the one that didn't get nominated for Best Animated Feature. I'd rather not discuss box office figures. I'll start with synopses.