Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

Director: Tim Burton

Cast: Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Jenna Ortega

Have I Seen it Before: Clearly, never. I did once have a dream when I was kid that I had lost my VHS copy of Beetlejuice 2, and was bereft to have the film leave my life. There was a time* when I wasn’t even sure I wanted a sequel to Beetlejuice (1988), but the Michael Keaton Rule** does prevail.

Then, I got more and more excited about the whole thing. Couple that with the odyssey that it took to actually get me into a theater on opening weekend, and I would have liked any old thing projected on the screen.

Did I Like It: I’ve seen the movie twice now—once to let it all wash over me, and a second to take more diligent notes for the soon-to-be-recorded episode of Beyond the Cabin in the Woods—and I’m happy to report it is not only pretty good, it is largely very good, and I’m not damning it with faint praise. It’s easily Tim Burton’s best film since they started beginning years with the number “2” and likely his best film since Ed Wood (1994). Keaton is brilliant again in the role, this time completely game for the prospect of re-visiting his 80s triumphs***. Ryder is a delight as Lydia, perpetually bewildered by the scope of her life thirty-plus years after first deciding she can see ghosts. O’Hara can do almost anything, and once again does effortless work to steal every scene she graces. Newcomer Jenna Ortega does something I didn’t think the film would be capable of and creates a new character out of Astrid, when the film would have likely been forgiven for just making Lydia’s daughter a 1:1 translation of the mother.

That’s the most delightful surprise in the film: for being a legacy sequel, the film is largely disinterested in fan service beyond the obligatory. Belafonte’s “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” makes the briefest of appearances, but the needle drops are all trying to forge something of a new path. The original film’s secret strengths were its army of strange and unusual**** dead people, and the fact that its depiction of the afterlife is a near Kafkaesque exploration of the bureaucratic. Both elements are in full force here.

In fact, the only real complaint I have about the film is one I didn’t think I was going to have going into the theater. Elfman’s score is just a rehashing of tracks from the original, with a menu of new noises added into the mix. I wanted more here, but then I realized it has been a very, very long time since Elfman wrote a really memorable score. Burton stepped up to the plate here, but it’s just a bit disappointing that Elfman didn’t do the same thing.

*It was never more profound than immediately after seeing The Flash (2023), around the time this film was already in production. I probably had that thought more than a few times during the endless series of stops and starts in the process. I am happy to report that the film doesn’t end with Betelgeuse being exorcised and being replaced by a different kind of Betelgeuse played by George Clooney. Had they pulled that trick again, I would not have been okay, and I said so.

**Sometimes called the Multiplicity (1996) amplifier, wherein a film is inherently better

***Man, the more that I think about The Flash, the more I have problems with it, huh?

****Apparently I tripped into more fan service in that sentence than the film is interested in for its runtime.

Scream VI (2023)*

Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett

Cast: Melissa Barrera, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Jenna Ortega, Mason Gooding

Have I Seen it Before: Nope, brand new. Well, sort of brand new.

Did I Like It: No review of this film will probably be complete without reckoning with the elephant steadfastly refusing to enter the room, Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott**. Campbell’s  decision to not participate in the film did nothing to remove her from the suspect list. That the filmmakers were still able without skipping a beat to get this film into theaters inside of a year after the release of Scream (2022) tells me pretty clearly that Sidney was not a vital part of this story. Watching it unfold makes it pretty clear that the film probably wouldn’t have room for her. Campbell claims that she was being undervalued by the franchise she has brought so much to in the past, and in a series where it is important to not believe much of what we are told, I believe her completely.

That aside, I find this new film to be an exercise in half measures. The opening sequence—with Ghostfaces upon Ghostfaces being hunted by other Ghostfaces—is promising to the point that I think the series may have found a new lease on life that I was never completely convinced had been earned in last year’s entry. What’s more, spending time with the new “core four” characters this time was so engaging that I doubled down on my desire for six more Screams to come. This doesn’t even cover the fact that Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox, the only original cast member to return, even though I have sneaking suspicion that Matthew Lillard is in a cell somewhere, waiting for Scream 7–Sceaivii?—to come find him) gave Ghostface the fake out we all didn’t know we had been waiting for for nearly thirty years.

And then the ending happens, and most (but not all) of that promise goes up in smoke. Difficult to talk about the ending of a Scream without playing all of the available spoiler cards, but it’s a little disappointing that the new character played by the most famous actor in the cast winds up being behind it all. That’s a rule that will get you to solution of most crime procedural episodes before the second commercial break. That the whole affair ends up being a barely warmed-over rehash of the series-best Scream 2 (1997) doesn’t help anything. And the fact that both the protagonists and the villains of the piece could all come together and agree that Sidney Prescott should not be bothered right now strains the credulity of even the most naive of moviegoers. Namely, me.

Maybe we did need Sidney and Neve Campbell after all.

*Or is the title really SCREAIVI? I’m honestly not sure.

**Which I absolutely typed as Sidney Bristow originally. Thank Wes Craven that I was able to catch that one before sending the review to the press.

X (2022)

Director: Ti West

Cast: Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Martin Henderson, Brittany Snow

Have I Seen it Before: Never.

Did I Like It: I can’t say that I found the first two-thirds of the film—you know, the part that would have functioned perfectly well as any of a number of softcore porno films airing on premium cable in the 90s—more than mostly boring. I usually find prolonged depictions of sex pretty boring, and it isn’t even remotely like the film has anything even remotely as fresh to say about pornographers as Boogie Nights (1997), or even anything as introspective about strippers as Showgirls (1995). The only even remotely profound things it has to say about sex are focused on the insistent grossness of its villains, which lends the film an ugly quality beyond its violence.

If that was all the film had to offer, then it would have been a pretty depressing experience, especially considering that the film comes pre-packaged as a franchise which could run for years, with an entire prequel imminent, Pearl, which had been shot concurrently with this film and another sequel on the drawing board.

So, how did the film win me over? First, the entire movie—for all of its flaws in tone—feels thoroughly as if it was produced in the time in which it takes place, the late 1970s. There’s never one moment when I could see the 2020s leaking through the film, and that is an impressive enough trick in its own right. When the film really gets going, it very nearly feels as if it was a long-lost slasher movie of the era, only turned up recently.

Which brings me to the film’s ending. Slasher absurdism abounds and ugliness in a number of forms pervades. This alone would limit the film to reaching only for the mediocre, especially when it is abundantly clear that it is slavishly devoted to being an homage of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). But that the film could tag the proceedings with a joke that proceeds somewhat logically from what preceded it, turns the entire thing into a comedic Rube Goldberg machine, and it’s hard not to like that.

Scream (2022)

Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett

Cast: Melissa Barrera, Mason Gooding, Jenna Ortega, Jack Quaid

Have I Seen it Before: Nope.

Did I Like It: Where Scream 4 (2011) seemed like it didn’t have enough targets and not enough time had passed since the original films to have much of anything to say about how horror and movies have changed in the ensuing years, there are an army of legacy sequels to fuel this film’s runtime, to say nothing of an ongoing, tense meditation between the more confectionary pleasures of slasher films and the rise of so-called elevated horror. 

At the beginning of this, the fifth film in the Scream series, the idea of continuing the series felt like a bit of a chore for this viewer. Indeed, had I not been on the upswing of my Beyond the Cabin in the Woods renaissance, I probably would have been content to miss this one. I’m glad I didn’t. The mystery of just who is the killer is played exceedingly well, to the point where I dismissed my initial, correct instincts. “It can’t be the boyfriend! They already did that,” I told myself, stupidly. Every ounce of the movie is designed to subvert expectations, right from the moment that the first idiot who decides to pick up a landline call in the 2020s actually makes it to the end of the picture.

Additionally, I have ultimately given up the ghost(face) on seeing Sydney Prescott (Neve Campbell, winning this year’s “Mark Hamill in Star Wars - Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015) award for barely showing up in the a legacy sequel, despite being integral to the film’s advertising) be the killer in one of these movies. It’s never going to happen, and now I can make my peace with the fact that it will never happen. I’m glad that there can be a horror movie legacy character who has mastered the ability of not letting their trauma dominate them. It’s just another subversion of expectation from a franchise built, at its best, on the idea.