THB #594: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (non-spoiler)

You know how people like to talk about movies they don’t make anymore.

That’s pretty much what Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is.

The film isn’t a gift to film critics… unless you count us as people who love all kinds of movies, high and low. It’s not a brain twister. It’s not the exciting experience of the first film that was unlike anything you had seen in the cinema. It’s a simple spin on a story that returns us to the simpler pleasures of the movies 30+ years ago.

It’s been 36 years since Beetlejuice, which preceded Batman by a year. (Yes, Virginia, they made big action movies in just a year and change after finishing the previous big action movies.) So it was Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice that led to Batman, which is why people thought Guber & Peters were insane to have hired Tim Burton. But Burton’s sensibility matched up well with the more self-serious superhero genre and made for the biggest opener ever at the time.

16 other movies followed before Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. On…