‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ Review: Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton Help Tim Burton Rediscover the Ghoulish Mischief of His Glory Days

There’s an inventive sequence early in the unexpectedly delightful Beetlejuice Beetlejuice in which the Bee Gees’ “Tragedy” accompanies Monica Bellucci’s soul-sucking demoness as her hacked up body parts are shaken loose from crates in the afterlife’s lost-and-found warehouse, where she proceeds to stitch herself back together like a gorgeous DIY Frankenstein monster. That scene multitasks as a show of kinship with the same actor’s role as a vampire bride in Bram Stoker’s Dracula; a tribute from Tim Burton to a key Gothic literature inspiration; and a darkly delicious valentine to the director’s offscreen partner of the past two years.

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One of many inspired set-pieces in a clever sequel laced with hilarious callbacks to the 1988 original and amusingly eclectic pop-culture references to everything from Carrie to Mario Bava, from Soul Train to Donna Summer, it’s not the only time during the movie that I scrawled, “Tim Burton’s back!” in my notes.

Any sequel coming 36 years after its predecessor is best approached with caution, this one especially so given that with the main exception of 2012’s Frankenweenie, Burton seemed to have misplaced his mojo somewhere around the turn of the new century — at least for this critic.

Tapping into the maniacally playful spirit of one of his enduring golden-era hits, the director seems reinvigorated. He serves up comparable tonic as well for two actors who were a big part not just of the original Beetlejuice but also of Burton’s Batman movies and Edward Scissorhands: Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder, respectively. The name in the credits of a second Batman Returns alum is no secret, but that actor’s droll extended cameo merits spoiler treatment.

Hollywood’s cynical strip-mining of successful IP in its quest for the everlasting franchise has taught us to be suspicious, so there’s something restorative for the audience, too, in experiencing a resuscitated screen property that’s actually fun — not to mention one that asserts its own reason to exist.

I sparked up and began to realize I was in good hands as soon as the spooky echo of Summer’s disco “MacArthur Park” cover segued to the first notes of a score by Danny Elfman, which starts in ominous mode and grows more devilishly jaunty as ace DP Haris Zambarloukos’ camera cruises through the sleepy town of Winter River and arrives at the hilltop haunted house purchased by the Deetz family in Beetlejuice.

Warner Bros. has been trying on and off to make a sequel happen since the early ’90s, most notably after the studio in 2011 hired Seth Grahame-Smith, who shares story credit here with screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. Burton’s success pulling off such a zesty follow-up after so many years on the shelf is due as much to those writers, with whom he worked on Netflix’s Wednesday. That series’ star, Jenna Ortega, is chief among welcome new additions to the holdover crew of Keaton, Ryder, Catherine O’Hara and shrunken-headed Bob.

Still wearing the jagged black bangs she rocked as a goth teen, Ryder’s Lydia Deetz is now a widowed mother famous for hosting a reality show called Ghost House, where from a studio attic set she invites viewers to “Come in, if you dare.” Mimicking the formula of countless paranormal shows, Lydia coaxes guests to share chilling experiences of unexplained phenomena in their homes. But a triggering vision of Keaton’s Beetlejuice sitting among the studio audience reveals that the psychic mediator has not put her own haunted past behind her.

Lydia has a strained relationship with her teenage daughter, Astrid (Ortega), who resents her mother spending more time with the dead than with her own daughter and chafes at her disinclination to talk about her late father, Richard (Santiago Cabrera). He perished in an accident in the Amazon, and while Astrid thinks her mom’s supernatural insights are hokum, she petulantly gripes that Richard is the one ghost with whom she can’t communicate.

Tensions between Lydia and her artist stepmother Delia (O’Hara) have eased over the years, despite the latter becoming even more self-absorbed in her shift from sculpture into mixed media. Her latest show is called The Human Canvas, and that canvas of course is Delia’s face and body.

The writers find a crafty solution to the awkward question of what to do about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Jones, who played Lydia’s father, Charles. In a spry Claymation sequence that’s classic Burton, we learn of Charles’ recent gruesome death — though naturally in the Beetlejuice world, death is more a pitstop than a destination, so the character lingers even if his original physical form is erased.

Barbara and Adam Maitland, the sweet, prematurely deceased couple played by Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin, are gone, however, as Lydia explains they’ve found a loophole. “How convenient,” scoffs Astrid, with a wink from the writers.

Charles’ funeral — whimsically accompanied by a boys choir singing a hymnal version of Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O,” another lovely callback — brings the family back to Winter River. Accompanying them is Lydia’s producer and soon-to-be fiancé, Rory (Justin Theroux), whose ridiculous tiny ponytail tags him as a phony, and whose “New Age, over-bonding, yoga-retreat bullshit” Astrid finds beneath contempt.

Wrapping the entire house, Christo-style, in black gauze, Delia sets about making her performative grief into a project dubbed The Art of Sorrow, while Rory seizes on Charles’ wake as the ideal time to propose to Lydia, who’s sufficiently caught off-guard to accept. Astrid’s disgust sends her speeding off into town, where she meets Jeremy (Arthur Conti), a fellow Dostoevsky fan and cool analog guy; they plan a date for Halloween night, when her mother’s “Witching Hour” wedding is scheduled.

While all this is going on, Bellucci’s Delores is terrorizing the netherworld, killing denizens “dead-dead” on her mission to claim the rotten soul of her husband, Beetlejuice. In a riotous touch that got huge laughs at the Venice press screening, their short-lived ghost marriage is recapped as a black-and-white, subtitled Italian mini-movie. Investigating Delores’ trail of destruction is Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe), a former TV action star now playing detective, with lots of cheesy direct-to-camera glances for dramatic emphasis.

The living (or “fleshbags,” as Jackson calls them) and the dead get tangled up when Astrid is tricked into a potentially fatal pact and Lydia is forced to summon Beetlejuice to help her cross over and save her daughter. Given that Beetlejuice doesn’t believe in free favors, an alternative wedding plan emerges to rescue him from Delores, a nightmarish scenario in which Lydia’s familiarity with the predatory sandworms of the afterlife’s exile desertscape comes in handy.

The zippy pacing, buoyant energy and steady stream of laugh-out-loud moments hint at the joy Burton appears to have found in revisiting this world, and for anyone who loved the first movie, it’s contagious. That applies also to the actors, all of whom warm to the dizzying lunacy.

The double-barrel title might suggest this is Keaton’s show, and he gets an ample share of antic opportunities — looking as moldy and slobby as ever and crawling with cockroaches — but he never crowds out anyone else in the strong ensemble.

His most exhilarating sequences include a stint as a trickster couples counselor when Rory decides Lydia needs to face “this construct of your trauma.” (The uproarious birth of a diabolical baby Beetlejuice during that scene yields one of animatronics chief Neal Scanlan’s most brilliant creations.)

If the use of Belafonte’s “Day-O” was a memorable high point of Beetlejuice, what the filmmakers and Keaton do with “MacArthur Park” in a wedding-from-hell climax takes the possessed lip-syncing and dance moves several steps further. The wedding cake with “sweet green icing flowing down” is a jubilant celebration of some of the daffiest lyrics ever set to music. And the fate of an assembly of cellphone-clutching influencers gathered in the church by Rory (“Nothing less than 5 million followers”) will bring bliss to anyone who ever rolled their eyes about that “career” path.

Ryder goes beat for beat with Keaton as the yin of the movie to his rancidly irreverant yang. The actress transports us back to the enchanting screen persona of her late teens, not just in Beetlejuice but also in movies like Edward Scissorhands, Mermaids and Heathers, in which she radiated a singular mix of smarts, sweetness and innocence but was just as effective when she veered into darkness. As much as anything, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a poignant mother-daughter story, played with real heart by both Ryder and Ortega.

The movie’s pleasures extend to Zambarloukos’ dynamic visuals and Elfman’s score, which has all the qualities of his collaborative peak with Burton plus distinctive new flavors. Another frequent collaborator, costume designer Colleen Atwood, does striking work for characters on both sides of the mortality divide, while production designer Mark Scruton has a ball creating a whole new network of afterlife antechambers, admin offices and departure terminals.

CG work is no doubt extensive but one of the sequel’s charms is how much its physical sets, puppetry and phantasmagoria stick to a hand-crafted look in line with the far more limited effects tools available in the late ’80s. It’s rewarding to have Burton back in full creative command of the humor, the fantastical imagination and the gleeful morbidity on which he built his name.