Tim Burton’s sequel ‘surpasses the original in almost every respect’

Arriving 36 years on, this follow-up to the director’s classic supernatural comedy is a gleefully zany farce packed with knock-out punchlines and great practical effects.

Betelgeuse is back from the dead. Or rather, Betelgeuse is still dead, but he’s back, anyway. It’s been an astonishing 36 years since Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice introduced the character, a demonic sleazeball played by Michael Keaton, but Hollywood being Hollywood, no intellectual property is allowed to rest in peace for eternity. So now Burton has directed a sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which was the opening film at this year’s Venice Film Festival.

I can’t say I had high hopes; after all, the last time a 1980s supernatural comedy was granted a sequel after several decades’ wait, the underwhelming result was Ghostbusters: Afterlife. So it’s a relief to report that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is more like a freakier, gorier and altogether slimier equivalent of Top Gun: Maverick. That is, it’s a sequel which has come along after 36 years, pays intelligent and affectionate homage to its predecessor, but surpasses that predecessor in almost every respect. Of course, it’s handy that Keaton was caked in corpse make-up in the first film, so his Betelgeuse can look much the same today as he did in 1988.

The nicest surprise is that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is that rare thing, a big-budget comedy which is actually funny. The screenplay by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar is packed with knock-out punchlines, and Burton’s visual gags manage to be hilarious even while pushing the boundaries of how eccentric and macabre a Hollywood blockbuster can be. A key point is that instead of relying on CGI, he uses such practical effects as puppets, prosthetics and bucketloads of goo, all of which make the jokes both funnier and more disgusting.

The film’s only flaw is that it has a couple of plotlines too many, which give it a drawn-out middle and a rushed and jumbled finale: as in the original Beetlejuice, it could have done with spending more time with Betelgeuse. Keaton’s snorting troublemaker now has an office job in the underworld, a nightmarish bureaucracy populated by lost souls with a variety of imaginatively gruesome mutilations. But he still pines after Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), the disgruntled teenage goth he tried to marry in the first film. Lydia is now a “psychic mediator” who presents a TV show produced by her wonderfully self-centred boyfriend (Justin Theroux). She also has a disgruntled teenager of her own, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), who is embarrassed by what she assumes to be her mother’s fraudulent claims to see dead people. And Lydia still doesn’t get on with her own stepmother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara), a shriekingly narcissistic artist who makes O’Hara’s character in Schitt’s Creek seem shy and retiring in comparison.

As in Top Gun: Maverick, the long gap between the old film and the new one turns out to be beneficial. Instead of seeming like a retread, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice stands up as a comedy with its own story and its own concerns. It can be quite moving on the difficulties of ageing, being a parent and dealing with bereavement. But then it always returns to ghoulish and cartoonish silliness again.

The idea is that the various Deetzes are brought together when Lydia’s father is killed: the actor who played him, Jeffrey Jones, is now a registered sex offender, which most likely explains why he wasn’t invited back. When the family gathers in the haunted house where Betelgeuse broke through from the other side all those years ago, there is no sign of the ghosts played by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis in the original film (“How convenient,” says Astrid when Lydia justifies why they’re no longer around). But Beetlejuice Beetlejuice still starts to creak under the weight of all of its characters. Astrid is given a love interest (Arthur Conti); Betelgeuse is pursued by his vengeful, Morticia Addams-like ex-wife (Monica Bellucci); and Willem Dafoe plays a vain former actor who works as a detective in the afterlife because that’s what he used to play in the movies. No wonder the writers can’t keep track of everything that’s going on.

As unwieldy as Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is, though, this gleefully zany farce is still one of Burton’s most enjoyable films, and a welcome return to his own brand of oddball creepiness after the Disney dud that was his 2019 live-action Dumbo remake. He reunites with some old friends in front of and behind the camera, and he throws in some musical numbers, animated segments and Italian film pastiches, so you can tell that he was having great fun when he was making it. Viewers will have great fun, too.