Horror and comedy go together like chocolate and peanut butter, though sometimes this confection melts all over the dashboard of our car because we left it out in the summer sun with the windows up. This ooey-gooey analogy serves us well when examining Tim Burton’s latest offering, which was over thirty-five years in the making.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is pure fan service, a nostalgic recapitulation of the main themes of the original film, replete with self-references and in-jokes that only fans of the original would get. Cameo roles from Danny DeVito and Willem Dafoe are real highlights from the film, while there are also some tongue-in-cheek jabs at modern self-help culture which, as the best comedy so often does, rings all too true.
From the standpoint of the plot, the film is a hot mess. There are way too many instances where dialogue was used to explain something they didn’t have time to show, and this was done in a number of ingenious ways, so, on the one hand, I couldn’t help but groan at the many attempts to move the story along in this way, while, on the other hand, I was impressed with how Burton worked around the problematic issues that arose.
Like Jeffrey Jones.
Catherine O’Hara, being the consummate comedic actress that she is, was an absolute delight in her reprisal of Delia Deetz, so I was doubly glad that this wasn’t overshadowed by an attempt to replace Jeffrey Jones, who played Charles Deetz in the original, with another actor. What they did instead, from a hilarious Claymation flashback scene to depictions of the afterlife, was kill him off without losing the character, and this would not have worked in any film other than a horror comedy.
So, dear reader, with respect to a review of the film, I wholeheartedly recommend it for fans of the original, like myself. It was pure, stupid, not-taking-itself-too-seriously fun, and every time I rolled my eyes at some asinine plot contrivance, I also laughed out loud at the way they worked it into the movie as its own metajoke.
But it got me to thinking about how so many actors who were among the best of the twentieth century got caught, in some cases quite literally, with their pants down.
Jeffery Jones was not among the big names in Hollywood, but he played a lot of major supporting roles to perfection. Before he was Charles Deetz, he played Emperor Joseph II in Amadeus. In his most iconic role, giving a performance that elevated what would already have been a good film into a true classic, he played Principal Rooney in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Yet all indications point to him being a pedophile. More prominent actors who left us with a bad taste in our mouths would be Bill Cosby and Kevin Spacey. Of course, it’s impossible to even have The Cosby Show without Cosby, but can you imagine The Usual Suspects or Seven without Spacey… or Ferris Bueller without Jones?
Is it as some people think, that Hollywood is essentially a clandestine cesspit of pedos and rapists, or is it that the corporate elite tend to look the other way when there’s money being made?
A little bit of this and a little bit of that?
I add this to the list of real-life horrors that pervade our culture, and as an indication of why we need the Horror genre to reflect that reality honestly, even when, sometimes, it’s not at all funny. Again, I must commend Tim Burton for ensuring that it was the specter of Charles Deetz, and not that of Jeffrey Jones, that haunted his long-awaited sequel.
