Just in time for the Halloween season, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the sequel of Beetlejuice (1988), has been released into the theaters! Tim Burton is back directing, with many of the original actors reprising their roles, such as Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice and Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz. New characters have been introduced, such as Astrid Deetz (Jenna Ortega), Lydia’s daughter, and Delores (Monica Bellucci), Beetlejuice’s ex-wife.

Spoiler Alert! The movie has so many plot points that it feels like they opened a can of worms and let them dig a hole to the underground and back. Building off on the original movie, Lydia tells the audience that the couple that had once haunted the house had ‘found a loophole’ allowing them to move on, explaining why they aren’t in the current film. The movie introduces the plot with Lydia’s father dying, and the characters return to the small town of Winter Rivier for the funeral. Lydia is joined by her eccentric step-mother, Delia, her unhappy daughter, Astrid, and her boyfriend, Rory. All of them have their own respective sub-plots.  When the group returns to the town, marriage proposals ensue and relationships are brought up with the dead. With all of these plots intermixing, Lydia is left with no option but to call Beetlejuice back into action.

In the 1988 original, the plot was much simpler, as the whole plot was based around the couple dying and wanting to get the living humans out of their house. This plot eventually led to them enlisting the help of Beetlejuice (who didn’t actually help but made things a whole lot worse). In the 2024 movie, with all of the different conflicting plots and Beetlejuice still as chaotic and unhelpful as ever, his place in the movie seems slightly unnecessary due to all of the other chaos going on at the same time. If the movie had had fewer sub-plots, it would have made more sense for Beetlejuice to be the main antagonist.

Delores, Beetlejuice’s ex-wife, was shown to be a soul-sucker who was able to kill the already deceased, wanting revenge on Beetlejuice. It had a great build-up throughout the whole movie, but was resolved disappointingly fast. In the end, the movie uses a sandworm to resolve the chaos of Delores within seconds, and she never gets the chance to have the potential to get revenge on Beetlejuice. Another potential antagonist was Jeremy, a seemingly harmless boy that Astrid meets when she goes into town. Jeremy turns out to be dead, and attempts to trick Astrid so he could swap her life with his. With the help of Beetlejuice, he gets thrown into a pit of fire within seconds, similar to Delores. Then to finish it all up, Beetlejuice was sidetracked in his own scheme by a contradiction in the contract he made with Lydia to save her daughter.

These aren’t the only plot points happening in the movie; there were many different storylines that made the movie difficult to follow. While the storylines may be all over the place, it still has the original Beetlejuice chaos which made the first movie so loveable in the first place.  Even if you do not go see the movie, there is a high probability you will come across Beetlejuice this Halloween.