Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Welcome back, Tim Burton. We've missed you.

“The Juice is loose!” 

So sayeth the titular ghost Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) in the long-awaited sequel to Tim Burton’s 1988 horror comedy of the same name (with one less “Beetlejuice” anyway). The same can be said for Tim Burton himself, who seems to have been set free from a long creative drought to make his zaniest, funniest, Tim Burton-iest movie in years. It’s a relief that a sequel to his own original film has busted him loose from a couple of decades mostly* marked by uninspired retreads of other people’s work – often under the thumb of Disney, the company whose early rejection of Burton’s creativity kicked off the director’s career to begin with. (Watch for a couple of pointed digs at the House of Mouse here.)

There wasn’t any particular reason why this should have worked after 36 years. Many such efforts at sequels have fallen painfully flat. But “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” has the fun feeling of getting the band back together after a long break, without leaning too hard on their greatest hits. Returning cast members from the original film include Keaton and Winona Ryder, both of whom have enjoyed well-deserved career revivals in the last decade or so, and Catherine O’Hara, who just keeps getting better over the years. Along with Burton himself, his mad genius composer partner Danny Elfman is also back in fine form, returning to his old stomping grounds of demented carnival music with panache. 

Much of the success of “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” may be down to the writing team of Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, co-creators along with Burton of the terrific Netflix series “Wednesday,” which has all kinds of macabre fun with Charles Addams’s morose teen, and will soon be returning for a second season. Together with Seth Grahame-Smith, they craft a story that expands on the bizarre world of the afterlife established by “Beetlejuice,” and carries its characters forward in time in believable ways, while introducing a host of new weirdos to love. 

In the last three decades since “Beetlejuice,” Lydia Deetz (Ryder) has parlayed her ability to see dead people into fame as the host of a cheesy ghost-hunting reality TV show. This show is produced by her flaky boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux), a long-term rebound relationship after the death of her ex-husband. Delia Deetz (O’Hara) has found success in a New York art world that has come to embrace her particular brand of self-obsessed grandiosity. (Here and there, this film subtly satirizes the navel-gazing narcissism of social media, which has turned everyone to some extent into a Delia.) 

Lydia’s daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega, coming over from “Wednesday”) would rather not have anything to do with any of them, strenuously trying to pretend they don’t exist while away at an exclusive boarding school. She blames Lydia for her father’s death and refuses to believe that her mother’s connection with the supernatural is anything more than TV hokum. 

These three generations of Deetz women are brought together to mourn the freakish death of Charles Deetz, the patriarch of the family played originally by Jeffrey Jones. (Burton and team could simply have chosen to wave away Charles’s departure from the story, as is done for the Maitland family from the original, but instead they mischievously lampshade Jeffrey Jones’s absence in numerous scenes. If you want to know why Jones hasn’t been in the public eye for the last 20 years, and why he deserves such mockery, just Google him. I won’t get into it here.) They return to Winter River, Connecticut, to bury Charles and to part ways with the original “Ghost House,” where the Deetz family first crossed paths with the supernatural and the infamous, profane “bio-exorcist” Beetlejuice. 

Bio-exorcism is big business now in the underworld, where Beetlejuice runs a whole agency staffed by shrunken-headed functionaries. But his knack for getting in trouble hasn’t changed, and soon all kinds of characters are chasing him, including his soul-sucking ex-wife Delores (Monica Belluci, stunning even with body parts stapled together), and Wolf Jackson, a paranormal investigator. Or rather, an investigator who’s paranormal himself, being the departed spirit of a vainglorious actor who played a cop in the movies, and now serves as a real cop among the dead. Wolf is embodied by a scene-stealing Willem Dafoe, who’s spent a lifetime proving that there is no role too wacky for him. Beetlejuice has got to find a way out, and he still thinks Lydia Deetz is his ticket topside. 

In the real world, things get awkwardly complicated when Rory desperately proposes marriage to Lydia at the wake of Charles Deetz, and Astrid runs away, only to find an unexpected spark of romance with a sweet, nerdy local boy named Jeremy (Arthur Conti). Jeremy provides the thrilling possibility of a healthy relationship with someone relatively normal. But normal isn’t what we’re here to see in a “Beetlejuice” movie, is it?

All these moving parts take quite a bit of screen time to set up, and I wondered for a long while if all these threads would actually amount to anything. But there’s one particular moment with Astrid and Jeremy when everything locks into place, roughly halfway through the film; and “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” blasts off from there in the headlong, madcap style that we hope to see any time Tim Burton’s name appears above the title. I won’t give too much away about how all these stories come together, and how Beetlejuice inevitably crashes back into Lydia’s path, but it pays off beautifully. 

In “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” we nostalgically revisit the handcrafted oddball world of its 1988 forbear, with delightfully artificial Expressionistic sets, and lots of in-camera effects and animatronics – not to mention cartoonishly frightful makeup by Christine Blundell and costumes by the legendary Colleen Atwood. The consistency of imagery between the two films is admirable in an age of wall-to-wall CG. Still, this is a hugely expanded fantasy world, and features some show-stopping set pieces. These include a visit to a real “Soul Train,” (yes, they go there, and it’s hilarious), and a climactic number that does for Richard Harris’s “MacArthur Park” what the original did for “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song),” which had me howling with laughter in the theatre. We even get a bit of back story on Beetlejuice and his former wife, presented as a loving send-up of a Mario Bava giallo horror film.  

Burton stages all this with the gleeful energy of a dad decorating the neighborhood haunted house for Halloween — sure, he’s out to scare and gross out the audience a few dozen times, but it’s all in good, campy fun. He even shows a little of his sentimental side, allowing us especially to appreciate the bonds between the generations of women this story showcases — but he’s careful not to dwell too long in this territory, lest it blunt his Puckishly satirical edge. 

The cast is outstanding, too — Michael Keaton, at an unbelievable 72 years old, hasn’t missed a beat since his original turn as the “Ghost with the Most,” exploding with every bit as much Tex Avery-inspired lunacy as he did in the ‘80s. Winona Ryder lends the grown-up Lydia a bit of the anxious, traumatized edge of her beloved character of Joyce Byers from “Stranger Things,” but also a poignant note of genuine love for her daughter. Catherine O’Hara is a goddess of comedy, full stop. And across the board, everybody understands precisely what kind of movie they’re in and swings for the fences under Burton’s confidently deranged direction. 

“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” like its predecessor, is a work of anarchic, subversive joy —uncouth and irreverent, but seldom mean-spirited. Like all of Burton’s best work, it’s a celebration of outsiders and misfits who feel most comfortable when they let their freak flags fly. It doesn’t all quite land neatly; its brisk one-hour, 44-minute run time doesn’t allow quite enough space to bring some of the many story elements to complete fruition. But in an age where movies all too often overstay their welcome, it’s just fine to leave the audience wanting more in a few places.

Will there be a “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice?” I don’t really feel like we need one, but after “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” I wouldn’t say no to it either.

*Mostly. A few bright spots include the undisputed masterpiece “Big Fish,” which may very well be Burton’s best film.