After decades of development, Beetlejuice is finally getting a legacyquel — and, improbably, it’s from its original director and stars, Tim Burton, Michael Keaton, and Winona Ryder.
When the original movie was released in 1988, it became the unlikeliest of hits: A pitch-black comedy about ghosts, death, monsters, and a foul-mouthed bio-exorcist (that’d be Beetlejuice, played by Keaton) that was pitched to families and even kids. (Trust me: You’ll never guess what Beetlejuice was rated.)
Maybe the unlikeliness of that success is why Beetlejuice 2 took more than three decades to get off the ground; it’s awfully hard to catch lightning in a bottle once; twice is basically impossible. And looking back at Beetlejuice all those years later, the movie (which was written by Michael McDowell, Larry Wilson, and Warren Skaaren) does hold up as a really funny and truly twisted dark comedy.
But that’s the thing — it is so dark and so twisted, it is hard to imagine it being made today. Certainly, if Tim Burton tried to make Beetlejuice 1 right now, he would face enormous opposition, if not outright rejection. And even making a sequel to this beloved ’80s classic, it was all but guaranteed that the new Beetlejuice will have to severely tamp down certain aspects of the first movie (and remove others altogether) in order to appeal to modern audiences and their sensibilities. Here are seven examples from Beetlejuice that definitely won’t appear in Beetlejuice 2...
The Killer Dog
One of the most twisted jokes in the original film involves the deaths of the main couple, the Maitlands, who die after their car drives off a bridge. But the culprit isn’t an icy road or a drunk driver; Adam Maitland (Alec Baldwin) swerves to avoid an adorable dog and careens through the side of his town’s covered bridge. Then the dog hops onto the one plank that’s keeping their car from falling into the water below, and the pooch just ... hops off. Almost as if it’s on purpose. Almost as if this dog is a deliberate murderer.
This kind of humor is part of the reason people love Beetlejuice. In conventional Hollywood movies, dogs are the closest things that exist to actual saints; audiences will happily watch the slaughter of dozens of bad guys in a John Wick movie, but if one dog is injured, it is over. Do you think the sequel would be able to get away with a bloodthirsty, murderous yet adorable pup? I doubt it.
Truly Disturbing Special Effects
While some of Beetlejuice’s makeup effects veer into the cartoonish, others are downright terrifying. In the scene pictured here, the Maitlands are trying to terrify their house’s new owners into leaving. Barbara Maitland (Geena Davis) here has hanged herself in one of the closets, and in the next shot — which is too gruesome to even put on this website — she peels off her own face, revealing her skeleton beneath as her eyes bulge out. This is borderline R-rated stuff, and yet Beetlejuice wasn’t even rated PG-13; it was just PG! There is literally no way the sequel will be a PG-rated film — and it will probably need to trim out a lot of these more gruesome bits just to get that. More of this great article (ScreenCrush) - link - more like this (movies) - link
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