After a family tragedy, three generations of the Deetz family return home to Winter River. Still haunted by Beetlejuice, Lydia's life is turned upside down when her teenage daughter, Astrid, accidentally opens the portal to the Afterlife. (from IMDB)

The 80s were a wild time, that's for sure. In 1988, you still couldn't quite trust a PG rating. Tim Burton's spooky afterlife comedy, Beetlejuice, won over fans of all ages, but the things that guy got away with under the PG banner still surprises me to this day. Burton's penchant for the macabre came out in full force in that film, and has only been seen again in his movies from time to time since (showing up to some degree in movies like Dark Shadows and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, to name a couple). Beetlejuice centered on a married couple who die suddenly in a car wreck and find themselves living as ghosts, trapped in their house. (Which allows for some truly gruesome visuals as they try to scare people out of the house.) When a new family comes moving in, they end up seeking the help of a mischievous ghoul named Beetlejuice who ends up causing all kinds of mayhem in the process. The film has since become a cult classic, especially around Halloween, and it's surprising that it never saw a theatrical sequel given its popularity, despite spawning an animated series for television in 1989.

36 years later, Tim Burton returns to the director's chair for the franchise's first sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. This time, instead of focusing on the ghosts of Barbara and Adam Maitland, the story revolves around the family that had moved into the house after their deaths, the Deetz family. Winona Ryder starred in the first movie as the family's young daughter, Lydia Deetz, at just 16 years old. With Ryder's renewed popularity in recent years due to the runaway success of Netflix's Stranger Things (as Joyce Byers), it seems more than appropriate to have a sequel follow her character as an adult. Now in her early 50s, Lydia has a daughter - played appropriately by Wednesday's Jenna Ortega - who thinks her mom's ability to see ghosts is a fraud, especially since Lydia can't see the ghost of her husband, who tragically passed away at sea. When Lydia's father, Charles Deetz, suddenly passes away, the family reunites at the Maitland house where Lydia finds herself being haunted by the memory of Beetlejuice.

The original film had a pretty simple, straight-forward plot, with everything kept mostly inside the Maitland house, or in the world of the afterlife. This time around, the world for the Deetz family feels broader, and the sequel feels much more modern and adapted for a 2024 audience. Still, the world of Beetlejuice is true to the original film, and Burton goes out of his way to recapture the look and feel of the 1988 entry - using mostly practical effects and even some stop motion animation (for the sandworms). And this time around, the story feels more fleshed out and intricate than the first one had. Burton dives right in, continuing to explore the world of the afterlife he first created over 30 years ago. When I revisited the first film before seeing the new one, I was surprised at how little screentime Beetlejuice had in the original. In fact, he barely appears on screen till about halfway through the movie. If you were hoping for more of Keaton's quirky performance, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice delivers on that. There are also quite a few new characters introduced for this installment, in addition to Ortega's Astrid, including Justin Theroux as a smarmy love interest for Lydia; Willem Dafoe as a deceased actor who thinks he's a real grisled cop; Arthur Conti as a friend of Astrid (who totally channels Steve from Stranger Things), and Monica Belluci as a scorned former lover of Beetlejuice. It's a solid ensemble - something Burton seems to excel at assembling for his movies.

Now, the content... Again, I was surprised at how rough the original was when I rewatched it. I had seen it a few times as a kid, and I remembered things about it - even after having not seen it for probably a couple decades - that terrified me as a kid and really stuck with me. In that film, while the Maitlands try to scare off the Deetz's, Barbara literally rips her face off to reveal a skull and bulging eyes that pop out of her eye sockets at one point. Another time, the couple holds their decapitated heads in their own hands, with bloody results. Later, they try to make themselves look scarier by sticking their hands in their mouths and stretching their faces into dramatically elongated forms that are especially terrifying to younger eyes. It's just not a movie for kids. In the new film, you can expect a lot more to be shown along those lines... but gorier. Granted, all of the gross-out visuals and gore is done in a stylistic, semi-cartoony way, but it's nonetheless gruesome. For example, since ghosts appear just as they were when they died, we see a man missing his head and most of his shoulders with his body shaped like a shark bit the top half of him off. Many times, we see this person's body walking around, with blood spurting out of a tube in the center of the meaty wound when he talks out of it. Another scene has Beetlejuice asking Lydia and Rory to "spill their guts" during a therapy session, and then offers to go first. We then see bluish-green liquid and balloon-like intestines spew out from his belly in exaggerated fashion. In the same scene, he makes Lydia "pregnant" just by speaking it, and we see her belly grow really fast until she suddenly gives birth. A creepy Beetlejuice-baby - even clothed in his signature striped suit - emerges from her and begins gnawing on her leg (which we see close up), causing little bloody teeth marks on her leg. In another sequence, a woman's body parts fall out of a series of boxes and each piece of flesh is shown to have a red, meaty side where it was once connected together before apparently being hacked apart. She then literally pulls herself together, piece by piece, and staples the pieces onto herself (which is also shown in close-up). It's an awkwardly long sequence, too. Another dead character has part of their head missing, so we see their exposed brain and some ligaments on the side of their face in many scenes throughout the film. And there are plenty more gross or violent moments played for shock and laughs. Sure, some of it is pretty clever and sometimes amusing, but it's also mostly gross, too. Another dead person is shown with fish stuck to his skin (and they wiggle in place), with pieces of flesh missing all over his face and hands -- and even his neck appears to have been ripped up with a fish burrowed inside.

All of this is to say... Tim Burton certainly went "Full Burton" on this film, and it's more than evident. Fans of the first one will either love it or find it to be too much when it comes to the shocking sights, but anyone who loves horror films and gore will likely find this to be no big deal. The film's villain is also a "soul sucker," so we see them breathe in the lifeforce of its deceased victims and these victims then collapse into a rubbery shell of a body (like an empty full-body Halloween costume) and fall to the ground. While the darkness of the supernatural facets of the story don't specifically address demons (Lydia refers to Beetlejuice as a demon, but we find out his backstory as a human in this film) or the occult. Hell is implied as a firey pit - which we do see a person fall into at one point - but there isn't really anything that references the Christian belief system. Still, those sensitive to any tales regarding ghosts or the afterlife probably will want to avoid this movie (and its predecessor).

Aside from quite a few gruesome visuals (as touched on above), there is some profanity in the film, too, including one clear use of the "F" word and another curiously bleeped-out use of it. (The first, PG-rated, movie used the "F" word once as well, so this isn't too surprising.) There is also a bunch of uses of the "S" word and a few uses of blasphemy. Sexual content isn't too graphic, but a flashback to a character's wedding night, while it is being described in a suggestive way, shows two people embracing and then we see their shadows on the wall literally tearing clothes off each other as they get intimate. Beetlejuice also makes some suggestive remarks, as usual, and Delia makes a comment about birds mating (because of Charles being a birder) and refers to it as them "doing it" on a beach.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a sequel that has been a long time coming, and it's probably one of the better "legacy" sequels of titles from the 80's to come around in recent years as well. However, given the nature of the original film's afterlife subject matter, and Tim Burton's love for gross-out, or straight-up gruesome, visuals, this film - like its original - is certainly an acquired taste. Fans of the original should be relatively satisfied, but those sensitive to this kind of subject matter will definitely want to steer clear of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.