Composer plagiarising Elfman? (contains small spoiler)

This isn't really that big of a deal, more like an observation, but I thought I'd point it out anyway.

In the car chase scene near the end of the movie, where Mila Kunis' character "Rachel" has brought along certain dead bodies in the car, there's this music in the background, like a bizarre polka-ish score, with a strophe of sorts that is repeated again and again throughout the scene.

Did anyone else notice how this melody sounds a lot like the main theme in Beetlejuice? The strophe in American Psycho 2 resembles only the first half of the extremely similar strophe in Beetlejuice, but even with just half the strophe, it's completely identical.

Now, as a musician myself, I know that it's sometimes very easy to let one's inspiration emerge so strongly into one's own writing that before you know it, you've ended up nearly copying something that has inspired you, and you don't realize it before you compare it to the original material you're inspired by.

So I'm tempted to give Norman Orenstein the benefit of the doubt. But like I said, the strophe is so identical that it's hard not to take it as a blatant copy of Danny Elfman's composition. There are also some string parts in the Orenstein composition that once agian sound very similar to the Elfman composition.

I was hoping I could add some YouTube links showing clips from these movies, as a base for comparison, but I couldn't find any clips from that part of American Psycho 2. If you have the movie, you know which scene I'm referring to, so you can listen closely to the background music, and you'll see what I mean.

So what do you guys think? Is it a mere coincidence, or did Orenstein kinda "borrow" this strophe from Elfman?

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