a review of 阴间大法师2

ℍ𝕆𝕆ℙ𝕋𝕆𝔹𝔼ℝ 𝔼𝕃𝔼𝕍𝔼ℕ ℕ𝕀𝔾ℍ𝕋 𝕆ℕ𝔼: Kicking off this year's Hooptober with a Sunday matinee of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Although the script definitely feels like they dumped at least four different drafts of a Beetlejuice sequel into a blender and hit "frappe", I see this as a fine return to form for Burton after an extended trip into less personally engaging material. I appreciated the generosity of spirit that this one took towards its characters; whereas the original film was mainly interested in humanizing the Maitlands and Lydia, with the Deetzes serving mainly as comic foils, this one gives a lot of time and sympathy to Catherine O'Hara's Delia in a roughly parallel plot with Jenna Ortega's Astrid. It's also astonishingly gross/nasty for a PG-13 horror comedy, with the practical/tactile aesthetic of the original maintained with only a few noticeable concessions to CGI techniques. The trailers made me wonder if this would end up as another charmless legasequel, but I was pleasantly surprised.