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Belucci and Dafoe for example are standouts but they're let down by the script.

That's disappointing to hear. The writers have had over a decade to perfect the script, so that was one aspect of the film I was hoping would deliver.

The general response I've seen online is that the new movie's ok, but not the return to form Burton fans were hoping for. I'm not sure if I'll catch it in theatres. I might if I get time. It's off to a strong start at the box office though and is expected to pass $100 million by the end of the weekend.

Here's a video exploring the darker original version of Beetlejuice, back when it was intended to be a pure horror movie. The video also covers the lengthy development history of the sequel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3oymNDC3UU

Some sites are reporting that the budget of Folie à Deux is $200 million. For comparison, Wikipedia lists the first film's budget as $55 million. I wonder why the new film cost almost four times as much.

I wrote a piece of coursework on Irving's story for an American literature module I took when I was a student. The central theme was how the tale functions as both a ghost story and a comedy. In both genres the author manipulates the reader into expecting one thing, and then hits them with a payoff that surprises them by evoking either laughter or fear. Irving manages to do both in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. A similar feat can be found in 'The Open Window' by Saki, another ghost story which is creepily effective right up until the end, where Saki throws in a twist that turns the whole thing into a joke.

There are lots of great lines in Irving's original story. One of my favourites is:

Truth to say, he was a conscientious man, and ever bore in mind the golden maxim, "Spare the rod and spoil the child." Ichabod Crane's scholars certainly were not spoiled.

I don't think the wit of Irving's prose has ever fully translated into any of the screen adaptations. The animated Disney film is largely faithful to the story, with the obvious caveat that they added songs. As far as live action adaptations go, the most faithful is certainly the 1999 Canadian TV movie starring Brent Carver as Ichabod Crane. This came out the same year as Burton's film. It takes one or two liberties in padding out the plot to make it fit the feature length runtime, but it's true to the spirit and tone of Irving's tale and even adapts the framing device of Diedrich Knickerbocker transcribing the story as he hears it from the locals. The whole film is available to watch free on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWcYJs_xem8

My take on Burton's version is that it's inspired by the legend of Sleepy Hollow. So imagine if all of the folklore and superstition underpinning the original story was true. Burton's movie is a celebration of those myths, presenting us with a fairytale nightmare in which every terrifying flight of the imagination is actualised. Burton's version of the story is the type of tale the guests might have shared around the fire during the Halloween party at the Van Tassel estate. It's less an adaptation of Irving's story than a reinterpretation of the underlying mythology.

Mind you, I don't know that I trust Hollywood with that right now. Maybe in a year or three judging by the way certain things seem to be changing. But not now.

Here's my pitch for a 'diverse and inclusive' reboot catering to 'modern audiences' in 2024.

Ichabod Crane is a black schoolmaster who moves to the town of Sleepy Hollow, where his arrival is met by racism from the privileged white locals. He soon learns about a slave who was decapitated by a racist mob after attempting to escape on horseback and now haunts the local woods seeking racial justice by claiming the heads of the white men who murdered him.

Crane also meets Katrina Van Tassel, a pansexual mixed-race Latina girlboss who is trying to overthrow her patriarchal white father so she can become manager of the family estate and make amends for the social injustices her family has inflicted on slaves and indigenous people. Katrina helps the heroic Headless Horseman kill the racists who murdered him, while simultaneously fending off the advances of the toxic straight white man Brom Bones.

Ultimately Katrina rejects both Ichabod and Brom when she realises she's a strong independent woman who doesn't need a man, and Brom gets arrested for cultural appropriation after he impersonates the Headless Horseman.

RT critic score: 95%
RT user score: 13%

Budget: $150 million
Box office: £13.5 million

I wouldn't put it past modern Hollywood to produce something this terrible.

I'm also keen to revisit Sleepy Hollow and Sweeney Todd in the very near future.

Burton's Sleepy Hollow is essential autumn viewing for me. It's a flawed film for sure, and not a faithful adaptation of Washington Irving's story, but it's the last Burton movie I truly loved. In many ways, it's his darkest film. There's a lot of anger in it (even the Widow Winship's unborn baby and the Killian child get murdered!), and I attribute that to Burton's creative frustration over the cancellation of Superman Lives. It's got the best cinematography and art direction of any of his movies, and I find it to be his most frightening, intense and atmospheric picture. It's also full of nods to Universal Horror, Hammer Horror, Mario Bava and Roger Corman movies, resulting in a captivating experience for film buffs. The dark expressionistic atmosphere, violent action scenes and spooky detective narrative make it a worthy companion piece for the Burtonverse Batman movies.

To my mind, Sleepy Hollow marks the end of Burton's prime era. His output was never as good after that.

Michael Keaton interviews Beetlejuice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEpoz1_TjXA

According to People magazine, Keaton wants to use his real name for future acting credits. Henceforth he's going to be credited as Michael Keaton Douglas: https://people.com/michael-keaton-real-name-michael-douglas-start-using-it-exclusive-8705257

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgTBZmqrAIA

The only problem I foresee with that approach is that the original comic reads like a mood poem. It's messily structured and rambling, which works for a graphic novel (and possibly a TV show) but would be less palatable in a feature film. One of the reasons the 1994 movie is such a good adaptation is that it manages to impose a more coherent narrative structure on the story without compromising any of its themes. I don't think its success is repeatable. But maybe it would work. From what little I've seen of the new movie, it seems the makers departed significantly from O'Barr's source material. That approach clearly hasn't helped them win over fans.

Speaking of The Crow, I watched the third movie, The Crow: Salvation, on Amazon Prime last week. Salvation doesn't directly reference the previous two films and feels more like a standalone story. It has a stronger plot than City of Angels, and the main character isn't just a copycat of Lee's Draven. Alex Corvis has his own distinct look and backstory that set him apart from his predecessors. In that regard, the third film addresses one of my main criticisms of the second movie. Salvation also has a solid cast that includes Fred Ward, Kirsten Dunst, William Atherton and Walton Goggins. Dave Lea appears as a bad guy and served as fight choreographer and personal trainer for the lead actor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqiZTy1NB0E

The main problem with Salvation is that it looks cheap. It doesn't have the rich visuals, cinematography and ambience of the first two movies. Instead it feels like a teen-oriented CW version of The Crow. There's some bad CGI and the action scenes, while perhaps better than the second movie, still aren't as good as those in the 1994 film. The soundtrack is also weak and Graeme Revell's absence sorely felt.

Salvation improves over City of Angels in certain ways (the plot, cast and lead character), but falls short of it in others (the cinematography, soundtrack and ambience). I think I preferred City of Angels, just because the mood, visuals and score were more appealing.

There's a copy of The Crow: Wicked Prayer on YouTube, but I'm not sure I can be bothered watching it. Has anyone seen it, and if so is it worth a view?

I always watch The Lost Boys around this time of year. I'm not sure when the movie was filmed, but it feels like it's set in either late August or the first half of September. It's clearly summertime, but late summer. Lucy mentions school is about to start, there are dry leaves on the ground, and the sun is setting between seven and eight. It's that time of year when the northern hemisphere is transitioning from summer to autumn. The mood wouldn't have been the same if it'd been set in June at the height of summer, or in October around Halloween. Instead it's set during that transitional period between the two seasons.

This ties in with a broader theme that's prevalent throughout the movie – that of liminality, of the transformative twilight between two states. Michael is neither human nor vampire, but stuck in a transformative limbo between the two. This serves as a metaphor for adolescence being the liminal phase between childhood and adulthood. Characters in The Lost Boys exist on the periphery – the edge of society, the edge of the world between the living and the dead, between night and day. Much of the movie takes place on the boardwalk, which is a manmade world between the land and the sea. The vampires' hideout is in a cave that's right on the edge of the water; neither in the sea nor in the town above, but somewhere between. Schumacher includes several short sequences capturing twilight and dawn, showing the transition from night to day and vice versa.

I'm not sure how common this theme of liminality/transformative state is in Schumacher's other works, but you can identify it in some of his films. An obvious example is Flatliners, which deals with doctors exploring the threshold between life and death. D-Fens spends the entirety of Falling Down walking the edge between law and crime, order and chaos, sanity and madness. Dick Grayson in Batman Forever is wandering through a transformative state between family and orphaned loner, between law-abiding citizen and criminal vigilante. Like Michael in The Lost Boys, Dick is struggling to avoid becoming the very monster he's fighting. Bruce guides him through that metamorphosis and makes sure he emerges on the right side.

Anyway, those were just some random thoughts I felt like sharing. This post is also an excuse to reiterate that The Lost Boys is a really great film. It's Schumacher's best, in my opinion. I love the lighting and cinematography. I especially like how you can see the shadows of the trees outside projected into the family's house, and the reflected water-light effect on the walls of the candlelit cave. It's a beautiful movie. The soundtrack's great, the casting is flawless, and the script (co-penned by Last Crusade writer Jeffrey Boam) strikes a great balance between humour, action, horror and character development.

It's a brilliant film that's aged like fine wine, and it's also one of the few teen movies that I strongly relate to. I felt that way when I first saw it aged around 12 or 13, and I still feel that way now in a nostalgic sense. Beneath the fantasy elements, its depiction of male adolescence has a strong kernel of emotional truth: the peer pressure, the macho competitiveness, the unwillingness to communicate with concerned parents, the bittersweet sibling relationship. All of it rings true for me in a way most teen movies don't. Maybe it's because most teen films either focus on the female experience of adolescence or teen romance, whereas The Lost Boys is a more violent and masculine exploration of male adolescence. Whatever the reason, it still resonates with me.

It's also one of those movies where you can enjoy spotting pop culture references in the background. Like all the Batman, Superman and Star Trek comics in the comic book shop scenes, or the picture of Peter Cushing as Frankenstein in the background of Max's video store.

Well, Max was hardly likely to display a picture of Cushing as Van Helsing, was he?

The other really great modern-day vampire movie, which I'd rank on the same level, is Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark. It's amazing to think those two films came out in the same year. Along with the original Nosferatu, I rate them as the best vampire movies ever made.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VllIQYnC20s

This is a franchise that never should've become a franchise to begin with.

The film industry should finally realise that now. Alex Proyas has been trolling the studio on social media and posting links to negative reviews, including The Critical Drinker's.

I watched The Crow: City of Angels (1996) last night. I'll credit it with a few positives – it rates high for visuals and Gothic ambience (though not as high as the first film), Vincent Perez gives an impassioned performance, and I like the idea of the tragic love driving Ashe being his love for his son rather than a retread of the romantic storyline that was central to the original comic/film.

But aside from these merits, it falls flat. The action scenes are underwhelming, David S. Goyer's script lacks the poetry of the original, and the bad guys are forgettable and unintimidating. The film also introduces a weird twist to the mythology where the villain steals the crow's power by drinking its blood. Goyer later recycled a variation of that twist in the first Blade movie, where Frost uses Blade's blood to become La Magra. It worked better there than it does here. Goyer also recycled the peepshow scene from City of Angels in Blade II.

City of Angels tries to be a sequel to Proyas's film rather than a full-on remake like the latest movie. The female lead is meant to be Sarah, the little girl from the first movie, and Eric's cat Gabriel even makes an appearance. Graeme Revell also returned to supply the score, which is another of the film's stronger elements. But the comparisons don't work in City of Angel's favour. Too many images are recycled from Proyas's film, but they don't have the same power here as they did in his 1994 picture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptt-3fC3bcU

While Perez gives it his all, the character Ashe ultimately comes across as a pale imitation of Lee's Eric Draven. With Eric, you could feel his pain seeping onto the screen at every moment. The only respite he got was whenever he channelled that pain into rage directed at his enemies. Ashe lacks that intensity and comes across as a reluctant tribute act. I was disappointed with the lack of martial arts sequences, and how the action scenes failed to effectively capitalise on the hero's love of motorcycles. They should've done more to distinguish him as his own character with his own unique traits.

I didn't hate The Crow II. I enjoyed its visuals, its gothic Halloween atmosphere and Revell's score. But it's definitely a weak imitation of Proyas's movie. I wouldn't rate it higher than a 5 out of 10.

As with Highlander, there should've been only one.

One of the few continuations I've seen made decades after the fact that works is Blade Runner 2049. But I'm struggling to think of anything else up to that standard. I'll be able to assess Keatonjuice 2 in about a week to see how that fares.

I agree about Blade Runner 2049. I still prefer the 1982 film, but it was a good sequel that didn't detract from the original. The only other recent sequel to an eighties movie I can think of that was worthwhile was Top Gun Maverick. Hopefully Beetlejuice Beetlejuice will buck the trend.

To nobody's surprise, the new Crow reboot is a disaster that's bombing at the box office. Midnight's Edge posted the following video on the subject. Notice they used an image from this thread at the 2:15 mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkAZthCH7Fo

Their meeting is interrupted by the arrival of an unexpected visitor.

The Critical Drinker went so far as to call The Crow '24 the worst film of the year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8penX7EMJ8c

Like RoboCop and Ghostbusters, this is one of those remakes that should never have been given the go ahead. Watch the original instead.