Thirty-six years after treating us to the demented delights of his 1988 horror-comedy Beetlejuice, Tim Burton re-opens the doors of that superbly ghoulish cinematic funhouse with long-delayed sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice — and, I'm happy to report, it’s been worth the wait. Not only that, it's Burton's best movie since his enchanting 2012 black-and-white stop-motion animation film Frankenweenie.
The original Beetlejuice was only Burton's second full-length feature film, following cult 1985 hit Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, and it established the trademark mix of the macabre and silly, grotesque and surreal that cinema audiences would quickly come to recognize as "Burtonesque".
It also gave standout roles to Michael Keaton as the eponymous trickster demon and to Winona Ryder as misfit teenage goth Lydia Deetz. Back then, Ryder's Lydia narrowly escaped ending up married to Beetlejuice after newly dead couple Adam and Barbara Maitland (played by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) rashly summoned up Keaton's self-described "bio-exorcist" in a bid to rid their cherished small-town New England home of its ghastly new owners — Lydia’s businessman dad Charles (Jeffrey Jones) and avant-garde artist stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara).
In Beetlejuice Beetlejuice the now middle-aged and very tightly wound Lydia is the host of a paranormal reality TV show in which she acts as a psychic mediator between the living and the dead. The one ghost she can't summon up, it seems, is her late husband, Richard (Santiago Cabrera), who disappeared on a trip to the Amazon. Her skeptical and resentful teenage daughter Astrid (Wednesday's Jenna Ortega, wonderful), consequently dismisses Lydia as a delusional fantasist.
Then a death in the family takes Lydia and Astrid back to their old home in Winter River, Connecticut, together with Delia, her art practice even more pretentious and bombastic than before, and Lydia’s obnoxious manger-cum-boyfriend, Rory (Justin Theroux), who is fluent in flatulent New Age therapy-speak and hopes to smooth-talk Lydia into marriage. In her turn, Astrid, encounters in town a love interest of her own in the form of brooding, fellow Dostoevsky fan Jeremy (Arthur Conti) after crashing her bicycle through the fence of his family home.
Beetlejuice, Lydia's one-time demonic suitor, is meanwhile still confined to the Afterlife but continues to hold a torch for his erstwhile "fiancée". He, though, has troubles of his own as he strives to stay one step ahead of his literally soul-sucking ex-wife Dolores (Monica Bellucci), who — in an early scene set to the hysterically over-the-top strains of the Bee-Gees "Tragedy" — has managed with a staple gun to reassemble her formerly dismembered body parts (chopped up by Beetlejuice centuries before) and is now looking for vengeance.
With all these different plot strands flapping away, it is no wonder that the film's narrative veers all over the place — streamlined plotting has never been Burton’s strong point — but, trust me, it doesn't spoil the enjoyment of the film. Still full of demonic zest, Keaton's disgustingly sleazy, maniacally mischievous Beetlejuice remains a comic whirlwind, while Ryder's post-Beetlejuice roles (from Heathers and Edward Scissorhands to Stranger Things) add rich layers to her portrayal of Lydia. True, the story doesn't make the most of Bellucci's magnificently imperious, shiver-inducing Dolores, or of Willem Dafoe’s Wolf Jackson, a hard-boiled actor turned Afterlife police detective, both of whom disappear from view for more than we would like.
The film's visual and verbal gags flow so thick and fast, however, that it's hard to mind too much. Beetlejuice devotees will relish the many callbacks to the original film, including a reprise for Harry Belafonte's calypso classic "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)", memorably lip-synched in an episode of demonic possession in Beetlejuice. The new film's musical leitmotif comes, however, in the shape of Jimmy Webb’s overblown pop epic "MacArthur Park". The Donna Summer take on the song gets a spin, but it's Richard Harris's much-mocked version, bursting with melodramatic sincerity, that's used to great comic effect in a climactic set-piece scene.
We can tell Burton is having fun. And it's infectious. Another hugely enjoyable set piece sees him recounting Dolores and Beetlejuice's ill-fated marriage in the style of a black-and-white Italian horror film (cult director Mario Bava's low-budget 1966 Gothic chiller Kill, Baby… Kill gets a namecheck). Here and elsewhere, it's worth noting, Burton adds a touch more darkness and grisliness than he served up in the previous film.
Even so, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice can't, of course, recapture the shock and surprise its predecessor delivered. Then again, nostalgia for the earlier film is one of the pleasures Burton is keen to exploit, so familiarity is baked in. Happily, Burton recreates his old recipe in a way that honors the original film's B-movie aesthetic, not over-relying on CGI but deploying practical effects such as stop-motion animation, animatronics, puppetry and prosthetics. And it's this, I suspect, that will give many fans their greatest pleasure.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice releases exclusively in movie theaters on Friday, September 6 in the US and UK.
