Who doesn’t love Beetlejuice? It’s one of the most creative comedies to ever emerge from the Hollywood system, a textbook example of a great idea, well executed. It’s got a script that’s both widely appealing and completely unique, it’s got a perfectly cast ensemble of obvious movie stars right on the cusp of fame, and it’s got the best effort of an auteur who’s particular brand of genius was, at the time, cooking at a white hot intensity. All of this conspires to make one of the great films, a movie so confident in its comedic voice that its got scenes where characters are magically transported to Saturn and chased by stop-motion sandworms, and it never bothers to explain why. All in all, a classic. It’s been turned into a cartoon show, a Broadway musical, and even some weird video games, but the most obvious brand extension, a proper sequel, never materialized.
It was not for lack of trying. Granted, Tim Burton and Michael Keaton shortly rearranged the entire world of studio filmmaking one year later with Batman, and that got the bulk of their energies for the immediate future. But a script was commissioned and written. That script, of course, was Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian, a cross between 60s beach movies for teenagers and German Expressionism. It almost sounds like a joke pitch, for a film Burton never intended to make, but then what is Edward Scissorhands but German Expressionism crossed with a 60s teenager movie, just with the suburbs instead of beach culture? Batman Returns does the same trick with the superhero film. Screenwriter Jonathan Gems has said this contradiction was the main sell for Burton, and I’ll be damned if that isn’t exactly what this script delivers.
And ultimately, the script made it out into the wild. You can read it! The rest of this article will be an overview of this insane piece of cultural ephemera, spoiling all the strange decisions contained within, so, your call. Note that this is the 1990 script, written to follow up the original film, and not the Seth Grahame-Smith reworking of the idea from about 5 years ago (also titled Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian, as this is apparently the only sequel Burton was interested in making). So, let’s return to the halcyon days of 1990, right in the wake of Burton’s Batman, to take a look a what could have been the weirdest, most sexually confusing film of your childhood.
Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian opens with the man himself, the ghost with the most, adjusting to a new normal after the events of the first film. Stripped of his bio-exorcist license, Beetlejuice is reduced to working as a janitor in one of Hell’s supermarkets. He’s dating a burn victim named Rita, but he’s a shitty, disinterested boyfriend. Privately, he still pines for Lydia Deetz, the teenager he tried to force into marriage in the last film. Carries her picture around and talks to it lovingly, the whole deal. He’s visited by the ghosts of five Hawaiian holy-men, one of whom has leprosy, who ask him to come to their holy island Kanooka and scare off some land developers, which he declines, because of his license status. His head appears to be regular sized now, if you’re wondering.
So, weird imediately. Outrageously strange, even. I didn’t even mention the slugs with human heads. There’s 122 pages to go, and it only ramps up from here. Quickly, we’re reintroduced to the Deetz family, as they are indeed the Kanooka developers. If you’ll recall, Charles Deetz, the goofy patriarch played by (since outed pedophile) Jeffrey Jones in the original, is a land developer, and he’s purchased a small Hawaiian island, to open a luxury resort. This is creating environmental devastation to the local flora and fauna, and is being protested by the island’s teenagers, a bunch of lovable surfers and potheads. These kids are who we’ll be hanging out with for much of the film. They’re fine, this film’s version of the beach-loving kids from the Annette Funicello/Frankie Avalon teen comedies. There’s like a dozen of these guys, with names like Edgey, Ginger and Sukuvati, but the only one has any real narrative purpose is Kimo, the handsome surfer dude. Given the early 90s time frame, I was imagining Ernie Reyes jr. of Surf Ninjas!
One of the main reasons the original Beetlejuice works is Lydia, Winona Ryder’s prototypical Goth teen, and the Tim Burton outsider identification character. Crush-worthy for prepubescent boys and more, something of an icon for misunderstood little girls, Lydia is that film’s beating heart and so it makes sense that she’s more or less the protagonist here, even if she’s more of a reactive character (it’s not called Lydia Goes Hawaiian). Predictably ill at ease in Hawaii and nonplussed by her father’s capitalist scheming, she’s back to the sad introvert we met her as. Until she gets a look at Kimo, that is, and now she’s crushing hard!
There’s a lot of oddness here and, much like the original, trying to distill this wild collection of sight gags, metaphysical jokes and non-intuitive plot twists to its narrative beats is going to be tough. In short, the island of Kanooka has been cursed by the deceased holy men whom we saw earlier with no more waves, to discourage the Deetz’s development plans. Lydia turns out to have the magical ability to sing Hawaiian hymns and call the waves back, apparently a side effect of her time spent with the Maitlands in the original film (a passing reference to having lived in a haunted house is the only mention the main characters of the first film get. No clue what they’re up to). As she’s able to bring surfing back to Kanooka, she’s quick to befriend Kimo and the surf kids (referred to as ‘Beatniks’ in the script) and is swept up in their half-cocked attempts to protest the resort’s opening. Ultimately, the Beatniks kidnap Charles Deetz, and are quickly apprehended. This sequence is written as a pretty good comedic showcase for (since outed pedophile) Jeffrey Jones, who, aside from Lydia and Mr. Juice, is probably the returning character best served by this script. To spring Kimo and the gang, and discourage her family’s venture, Lydia consults with a local medicine man, Mr. Maui, about her potential trump card: everyone’s favorite sexually harassing demon. Mr. Maui persuades her to wait to summon him until she’s traveled to the afterlife in astral form and gotten Beetlejuice to sign a contract promising he won’t be such a sexually harassing demon this time out.
Whew! Lot of wheels spinning there. This takes us into Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian’s first big sequence: Lydia’s trip to Hell. A lot of this script mirrors the original film, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. This sequence fills the role that the original’s dips into underworld bureaucracy, although it ups the ante, full of truly bizarre images and ballsy non-sequiters. The vibe is closer to something like Heavy Metal or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and there’s plenty of bits that feel like they’re included simply for weirdness’s sake. There’s a shape-shifting worm, a trip through the Garden of Eden presided over by an Eve-like female Goddess figure, an ocean of helium which Lydia surfs across, a bone monster with lungs for eye, just nonstop crazy visuals. She befriends a “head with feet” named Dave and goes on a date with him to a trendy afterlife restaurant frequented by sasquatches and headless corpses, who slurp spaghetti into their neck holes. This is all before meeting up with Beetlejuice, who’s still working in a grocery store.
So, how is Beetlejuice written here? It’s a bit tough to judge, as the focus is clearly on his narrative role, and Gems makes no real effort to duplicate the stream of consciousness insanity Michael Keaton brought to the original. Beetlejuice makes jokes, sure enough, but they’re not exactly inspired, in that specific way you might remember. They feel like place-holders, waiting for Keaton to arrive on set and turn on the Juice, such as it were. It’s also about here, when Lydia and Beetlejuice finally get together, that it begins to feel reminiscent of the other version of these characters, the Saturday Morning cartoon show. This is the central relationship of the film, for sure, and unlike the original, the interplay between the two is, well, complicated. They’re allied, yet mistrustful of one another. She seems to be wary of him, but certainly not as much as she should be, considering A) everything that happened last time, and B) he’s a demented sex ghost she brought out of Hell. There’s a contract she made him sign, but we never even hear what it stipulates, and it’s forgotten about as soon as they leave hell. And more than anything, he’s trying to seduce her, both directly and insidiously, and apparently, if she does marry him (as he planned in the last film), it’s kind of a green card situation, and he can come back…to life, I think? Anyway, the Beetlejuice/Lydia romance is actually a huge part of this script, maybe even the central plot. You do get the sense it is supposed to be icky, but maybe not quite as icky as it ended up.
Before Beetlejuice can help her, he needs to get his license reinstated. They achieve this by making a deal with black market dwarf, who, in exchange, gets to inhale Lydia’s astral form like marijuana smoke. So, Lydia returns to the land of the living, and calls his name three times, officially summoning Beetlejuice to Hawaii. It takes him about half a page to get Kimo and the gang magically released, so he asks Lydia if he could have a little bit of time off to relax and enjoy Hawaii, before scaring her folks away. Ok, she says, but only three days. This is one of the lazier act breaks you could write, likely, but it certainly allows the next forty pages to happen.
And those forty pages fulfill the promise of Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian, a plotless beach movie hangout with lots of pervy magic! BJ is an immediate hit with the kids, posing as a fancy celebrity photographer. No word in the script what he looks like here, but considering how much of this is beach set, one can’t help but wonder if he’s shirtless. Keaton wore a fake gut for the role, so, are they going to try and do that with makeup? Is he going to be covered in the green snot and bile that’s layered on his face? What’s the Beetlejuice nipple situation? I expect he’d just wear a striped black and white Hawaiian shirt, for the most part. But what about when he’s swimming?
So there’s various beach movie/ghost magic shenanigans, but the spine of it is Beetlejuice wants Lydia to like like him, but she’s into Kimo, so they compete for her attention. Frustrated, BJ uses magic to turn a cactus into a sexy teen girl with a crush on Kimo, and now Lydia and this cactus are competing for Kimo’s attention. This character, named Cactus, is one of the comedic highlights, and I wish she was in it a bit more. So, it’s a four-sided teenager love triangle, except one of them is 40-year-old Michael Keaton and another one is a sentient plant. This stuff is walking some kind of fine line, but the script soon blows past that line, featuring several handsy ghost jokes, with BJ sprouting multiple arms so he can feel up all of Lydia’s erogenous zones at once. Too tame, you say? What if Beetlejuice turns Lydia and himself into tailed merpeople, and they swim to bottom of Pearl Harbor and have a make-out session in the wreckage of a battleship? Was Beetlejuice some kind of sexual awakening character for preteen girls that I wasn’t aware of? Of course he was, I guess. Anyhow, he’s written here like an asshole ex-boyfriend who’s undeniably still sexy.
Someone made this. You can buy it, in theory.
Weird shit. This section also features the script’s attempt to duplicate the magic of OG Beetlejuice’s most famous sequence, the Day-O musical number. It’s a lot more conventional here, basically an extended live performance by Beetlejuice of the R&B hit Harlem Shuffle. Might be fun, but on paper, it doesn’t quite have that je ne sais quoi that Day-O did, you know? Otho, so far having languished in the script, arrives on the scene here, and recognizes Beetlejuice from the last film. He attempts to banish him by saying his name thrice, but Beetlejuice magically causes him to burst into flames! Not bad, and it leads to one of the better lines in the script. Delia, hearing Otho lit himself on fire: “I hope he’s not free-basing again!”
It all leads up to the opening of the Deetz’s resort, and the BIG SURFING CONTEST. Beetlejuice, deciding he’s losing Lydia to Kimo, procures a love potion from the ghostly Hawaiian holy men, and doses her into falling in love with him. They plan to wed on the day of the contest. I don’t know where we were with love potions in 1990, somewhere between ‘whimsical plot contrivance’ and ‘plainly a rape drug’, but I guess that plays to what they’re going for here. Kimo thinks if he can win, he might be able to impress Lydia. So, it’s a big, goofy surf fight, and it seems pretty fun. I’d watch Beetlejuice surfing a pipeline while spinning on his head. I mean, good luck making it look good, but I’ll absolutely watch them try.
BJ wins easily, and it looks like he’s going to get his green card marriage after all. He and a still-dosed Lydia are to be wed at the resort’s gala opening (he’s disguised as a wealthy oil baron ‘Monty Exxon’). And it would have worked too, except for a pretty clumsy deus ex machina, where the Eve-like God figure from the adventures in Hell part of the film returns, declares she’s Beetlejuice’s Mom, cures Lydia, and delivers a strange monologue about endangered species, before disappearing right out of the film. So out of the blue it must be an intentional joke, this is just about the weirdest, most unsatisfying plot development in Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian, but who gives a shit, because it’s also when thing goes completely bananas.
Beetlejuice, enraged, grows his head to enormous proportions, declares himself ‘Juicifer’ and decides he’s going to kill everyone. The Tiki statues in the resort come to life and attack, the cars on the street turn into ‘metal wolves’ and start eating people, and the hotel’s impressive collection of prehistoric fossils animate. Strangely, the giant Moai heads from Easter Island come to life, crawl out of the ground (they’re buried giants, turns out), and transport themselves to Hawaii, to start wrecking shit. This kind of feels like Gems, in a hunt for all manner of tropical kitsch, forgot Easter Island is like five thousand miles away. Lydia, Kimo and Mr. Maui try to round up all the people and get them to climb to the top of the volcano and pray to Pele to save them, while Beetlejuice turns into a giant Death’s Head moth and starts vomiting slugs everywhere. Delia almost gets raped by a caveman, but Charles saves her, which improves their failing marriage. In the end, Lydia sings a magical wave song, summing a tidal wave that washes all the monsters away. This angers Beetlejuice to the point where he decides to kill her, but the day is saved by Otho, who, after having spent the back half of the script enduring humiliations both painful and comic, is given the honor of yelling Beetlejuice’s name thrice, and banishing him back to Hell. There’s some wrap up, with all the humans happily paired off. Beetlejuice, back in Hell, ends up accidentally dosing himself with the love potion, and finally falls for his long-suffering girlfriend Rita the burn victim. They go to a Hell nightclub and Beetlejuice performs the Harlem Shuffle again, and that’s the outro.
This is, undeniably, a pretty good ending, and one I would have loved to see 1990 Burton attempt. As to the film as a whole, it’s a bit of a mixed report. Beetlejuice is a great little film that requires no sequel, and this is narratively pretty messy. The characters as we remember them aren’t especially well represented, with the title character clearly written with the invisible asterisk ‘Insert Michael Keaton here’ over many of his lines. Delia, played so memorably by Catherine O’Hara in the original, gets damn near nothing here, except for the chance to be sexually menaced by a caveman. And speaking of that, the sexual politics of this thing are absolutely demented. The tone most successfully carried over from the teenager beach movie ends up being horniness. Consider this the Batman Returns to the original’s Batman, a surprisingly thirsty follow-up with the potential to do a real number on kids in the grip of puberty.
AND YET. There are simply not many movies anything like this. On Burton’s resume, this goes farther than the first film ever did, coming much closer to anarchy matched on by Mars Attacks! or in the strangest moments in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. There’s images in this script that are surprising and bizarre, but with the original film as a frame of reference, are immediately clear in the mind’s eye. I was constantly surprised by this thing, and it really does feel unique. While there’s some value in having your memory of Beetlejuice uncluttered by an expanded universe of sequels, answered questions and just plain old ‘more’, I do feel confident in imagining that if this film did exist, there sure as hell wouldn’t be a Beetlejuice 3. This one goes too far and transgresses too much. And in that, it has my respect.
Check out the last unproduced script review, on Guillermo del Toro’s At the Mountains of Madness