HAUNT GENERATOR

Opening this weekend:

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice--To the list of Gen X-era movie favorites getting very belated sequels, the sweetly macabre 1988 comedy Beetlejuice may now be added. You may remember the title character (spelled, outside of the title, like the red giant star in Orion) is a manic ghost who specialized in exorcizing the unwelcome living from haunted houses. Like Clive Barker's Candyman, he could be conjured into the world of the quick by speaking his name aloud three consecutive times, after which he would wreak havoc.

It's one of the signature roles of the great Michael Keaton; probably his greatest comedic triumph. The film also featured a breakthrough performance by Winona Ryder as the endearing, self-consciously "goth" heroine Lydia, and was a showcase for the visual and comic style of director Tim Burton. It's unquestionably a classic of '80s popular cinema, and it gave rise to a TV cartoon, video games, comics, a long-running stage show at Universal Studios theme parks, and eventually a Broadway musical that put Representative Lauren Boebert into an uncommonly good mood.

None of which necessarily means, of course, that a sequel was required. But one has been made, directed by Burton, starring Keaton, Ryder, and Catherine O'Hara, and scored by Danny Elfman. It has, in short, the stamp of authenticity, and this many years later it's a bit surprising that the original makers have managed to infuse, if anything, even more craziness into it.

Ryder's Lydia, now widowed, is still able to see ghosts, including the occasional startling glimpse of her old nemesis. She's the host of a paranormal TV show produced by her intolerable boyfriend (Justin Theroux). Relations between Lydia and her teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) are tense, but circumstances bring the two of them and Lydia's stepmother Delia (O'Hara) back to the old house in picturesque small-town Connecticut. Before long, the boundary between our world and the Kafkaesque, DMV-style bureaucratic afterlife has been breached, and the title ghoul is trying to insinuate himself back into the picture.

What ensues, strung along a script by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar from a story by Seth Grahame-Smith, are more of Burton's elaborate yet non-sequitur slapstick set pieces. The gross-out content is slightly higher here than back in 1988, but it works. The original, you'll recall, had a fixation with Harry Belafonte songs from which its most memorable sequences arose; the new movie is likewise enriched by similarly out-of-nowhere musical interests, even more grandly staged. There are sequence here that achieve true, weapons-grade silliness.

Ortega is touching, and there are other effective new additions to the cast, like Willem Dafoe as an afterlife cop--he was a movie cop in this life--with an exposed brain, or Arthur Conti, excellent as a local kid who charms Astrid. Best of all is Monica Belluci, formidable as the enraged ghost of the leader of a "soul-sucking death cult" who has an unhappy history with our titular hero. The scene in which she pulls herself together with the help of a staple gun is a Burton classic.

Keaton, though used somewhat sparingly, slips easily back into his role, tossing off asides in his muttering natter (or nattering mutter?) with the same moldered aplomb, and moving with the same light-footed exuberance, with which he conducted himself three decades ago. Ryder is also perfectly convincing as the middle-aged version of Lydia; tinged with a hint of emotional desperation in her interactions with Astrid.

I know it sounds ridiculous, and maybe I'm just projecting, but I thought that Ryder, O'Hara and even Keaton brought a subdued, rueful undercurrent to their performances, as if stirred-up memories of the first film's events had awakened genuine emotional pain. Don't misunderstand; if it's there, it's done without the slightest heavy-handed intentionality; it may not even have been conscious on the part of the actors. But it deepens both this film and the original.

STAKES' RIGHTS

With Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln opening this weekend…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod to Adam, the antebellum bloodsucker with Confederate sympathies, who takes on Honest Abe in the terrible but sort-of-amusing movie of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter:

Here’s Adam, played by Rufus Sewell, before and after dining:

A STITCH IN TIME SAVES CANINE

Tim Burton gives the boy-and-his-dog movie a macabre but touching spin in Frankenweenie, a remake, from Disney, of his 1984 live-action short. Suburban boy-genius Victor Frankenstein’s beloved dog Sparky gets run over, but Victor, a science whiz, robs his grave and zaps him back to life in a makeshift lab in the attic, in the manner of James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein.

Other kids get wise to Victor’s revivifying technique and, dreams of science-fair glory in their eyes, try it on a dead turtle, rat, Sea Monkeys and other creatures. A “Weird Girl” even manages, inadvertently, to create a hybrid of her equally weird cat Mr. Whiskers with a bat. The results of all this weird science wreak riotous havoc on the town’s festival, and it raises an angry mob that chases Sparky toward the windmill on the hill…

Rendered in stop-motion and ravishing black-and-white, with a voice ensemble that includes Catherine O‘Hara, Martin Short, Martin Landau and Winona Ryder, all propelled by a splendid Danny Elfman score, this striking piece of movie craft is an homage, principally, to the Universal monster pictures, though it also carries references to everything from Gamera to The Birds to the Hammer films. Indeed, if the film has a fault it’s that it’s too dense and overstuffed with references, witty though they are, for its brief running time.

But the characterizations compensate for the feverish tone of Frankenweenie's parody. Victor has a beautifully long, gloomy face—a bit like a boy version of Burton, perhaps; he’s a junior filmmaker as well as a scientist—and his grief isn’t just a plot point. His parents are a bit generic, maybe by design, but the kids, the science teacher, Weird Girl and Mr. Whiskers, the monsters, the neighbor poodle with whom Sparky has a connection—all of them are vividly real beings.

As for the title pooch, he’s classic; one of the all-time great achievements in stop-motion characterization. Sparky is so deeply endearing that he ensures an authentic emotional response to Frankenweenie. Both visually and as a piece of sustained narrative, this may be Burton’s most satisfying movie since Ed Wood. It’s one of the better films so far this year.

HOWL IN THE FAMILY

With Dark Shadows now in theaters, why not one more…

Monster-of-the-Week: …from the original ABC show: Quentin Collins, the dashing young rogue played David Selby in thick, lupine sideburns, and also, just a minor detail, nothing really, a werewolf…

The character isn’t included in Burton’s film, though Selby has a cameo, but perhaps if there’s a sequel it could feature this hairy cousin of Barnabas?

Selby, by the way, is still acting, handsome and patrician-looking as ever, recently seen as the lawyer representing the Winklevoss brothers in The Social Network.

SHADOW PLAYFUL

As Barnabas Collins in Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows, Johnny Depp comports himself like a Gothic popinjay. He carries himself proudly erect, and speaks with orotund, self-dramatizing verbosity and sweeping gesture, whether anyone else is around to hear him or not. The performance is a near-tour de force of comic, cosmically wounded dignity.

Being a vampire, he must occasionally feast on the blood of the living, but he does so reluctantly, first offering his victims polite regrets. His great wish, other than to be reunited with his lost love Josette, is to restore his family’s Maine fish cannery. He’s a bit of a pussycat, as undead revenants go.

It’s hard to say to whom this Dark Shadows is being marketed. The film is a parody, a pretty broad one, of the Gothic-horror soap opera (ABC, 1966-1971) on which it’s based. Created by Dan Curtis and writer Art Wallace, the show began as tempestuous bosom-heaving romance, perhaps in the vein of Barbara Cartland, but faced with sinking ratings, the writers began to experiment with ghosts and other supernatural elements about six months in, and eventually they threw a Hail Mary in the form of Barnabas, a forlorn vampire played by an obscure Canadian stage actor named Jonathan Frid.

He was a hit, and so the show threw caution to the wind—witches, werewolves and any other gruesome menace became fair game. Two movie spin-offs, House of Dark Shadows (1970) and Night of Dark Shadows (1971) were produced, along with dozens of tie-in novels, comic books, toys, puzzles, etc. I was too much of a wussy, at six or seven, to watch the show for more than a few wide-eyed minutes during its original run, but I got hooked on it in junior high, when it ran in syndication. Even by soap standards, it seemed to have a high incidence of blown lines, crew members caught on camera, actors struggling not to crack up, but somehow this didn’t defeat the show’s spooky yet oddly bracing atmosphere.

The Burton film’s script, credited to Seth Grahame-Smith of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, takes scraps of plot from the old show and stitches them together, but there’s almost no serious attempt at spookiness. A friend of mine said that the ads make the movie look like a sketch from The Carol Burnett Show.

Many fans of the original series are likely to be disappointed—if not outraged—by such an approach, while non-fans and younger viewers are unlikely to be too interested in a comedic version of an old TV show that they may never have heard of in the first place. Overall, the film seems poised to be vaporized by The Avengers’ second weekend like a vampire by a ray of sunlight.

A small pity if so, because while Dark Shadows is hardly high art, it’s sort of an endearing trifle. As always with Burton, it’s a beautiful movie to look at, with a whimsical, Edward-Gorey-ish look (the production designer is Rick Hienrichs) and a ridiculously attractive cast.

My friend’s take on the movie’s attitude was about right—it plays like a string of Carol Burnett sketches, with a bit more polish to the jokes and a lot more polish to the production. The target of the parody isn’t Gothic melodrama but ‘70s kitsch culture, with the 18th-Century sensibilities of the resurrected Barnabas bounced off of hippies and television and lava lamps and fast food signage and Steve Miller’s “The Joker” (of which Barnabas approves—unsurprisingly, since as played by Depp he most certainly speaks of the Pompatus of Love).

Depp is a hoot, but he isn’t alone. The high-ticket cast is fine form: Michelle Pfeiffer in Joan Bennett’s old role of matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, Chloe Moretz as wild child Carolyn Stoddard, the waiflike Australian Bella Heathcote as Victoria Winters, Jackie Earle Haley as drunken handyman Willie Loomis, and the always-excellent Helena Bonham Carter as the shady shrink Dr. Hoffman. Alice Cooper and Christopher Lee turn up in guest roles.

The movie is close to stolen, however, by the French actress Eva Green as Angelique Bouchard, the witch who cursed Barnabas with vampirism when he didn’t return her love, and who’s still around in the 20th Century, running a rival fish cannery and looking intolerably chic. Green (she played Vesper Lynd in the 2006 Bond film Casino Royale) makes Angelique’s spite a lively aphrodisiac; she has a crazy-eyed smile that’s both alluring and terrifying, and her skin’s tendency, in moments of stress, to crack like the shell of a hard-boiled egg is rather captivating, too.

Burton and Grahame-Smith probably try to touch too many bases from the series—the movie is cluttered, and it goes on at least twenty minutes too long. But overall, it’s a goofy pleasure. Like the old show, it’s an enjoyable waste of time. Unlike the old show, it can be experienced in one sitting, and its laughs are intentional.

TEAM BARNABAS

With the departure last week of Canadian actor Jonathan Frid...


Monster-of-the-Week: …the obvious choice for this week’s honoree is Barnabas Collins, the conflicted New England vampire antihero of Dan Curtis’ cult-favorite horror soap opera. I mean, of course, the original Barnabas, played by Frid, not Johnny Depp's interpretation in Tim Burton's upcoming Dark Shadows movie.

I could be wrong (if anybody can think of a later example, correct me) but I think Frid may have been the last actor to become a horror star the old-fashioned way, by putting on evening clothes and a cape and fangs…

…instead of a hockey mask or finger knives, the last of the Lugosi-style old-school boogeymen rooted in 19th-Century stage melodrama. The role defined Frid’s relatively short career; within a few years of the soap’s end he’d mostly left showbiz, the occasional theatrical venture or one-man tour excepted.

But for a few years this slight, hollow-cheeked journeyman ham had serious fans, some with ardent crushes on him. Earlier this year, I happened to pick up one of the many Dark Shadows tie-in novels, Barnabas, Quentin and the Grave Robbers…

…and found Barnabas entirely whitewashed into a Gothic-romantic hero.

The character remains a minor cultural icon forty-odd years later. The reason, I think, has less to do with Frid being scary than with the same factor that made Lugosi, Karloff, Chaney, Price, Lee and the rest into stars: He was peculiarly likable, even lovable. In the end, the monsters that last are the ones for which we feel affection.

STALK CHARACTER

Having already played one of pop culture’s most famous vampires, Barnabas Collins…

…in Tim Burton’s upcoming movie of Dark Shadows, Johnny Depp is now reportedly set to play a famous vampire hunter, reporter Carl Kolchak, in a movie of the short-lived but fondly-remembered ‘70s-era spookshow The Night Stalker, to be directed by Sean of the Dead’s Edgar Wright.

So…

Monster-of-the-Week: …in acknowledgement of this worthy project let’s recognize the first quarry of the original Carl (the great Darren McGavin): Vampire Janos Skorzeny, the Las Vegas-based bloodsucker played by the ever-menacing Barry Atwater…

Skorzeny & Carl went fang-to-stake in the original 1972 TV movie. Wright & Depp will have their work cut out for them to top that pilot’s atmosphere…