Beetlejuice 2 may be a reanimated corpse, but it’s still got it.

There was each purpose to strategy Beetlejuice Beetlejuice with the trepidation of a haunted-house proprietor opening a creaky attic door. The unique Beetlejuice is 36 years outdated now, a type of perennial crowd-pleasers that has achieved the rank of confirmed traditional with out fairly being an awesome film. Tim Burton’s 1985 debut function Pee-wee’s Large Journey, one other enduring favourite, might be a extra cohesive and constantly funnier movie. However with Beetlejuice in 1988 got here the primary full reveal of the Burton sensibility, a set of aesthetic and thematic preferences that landed on the time as authentic, irreverent, and contemporary: neo-gothic style, macabre black humor, and an virtually Expressionist sense of manufacturing design.

Burton’s comedy-horror mashup pictured the afterlife as a sprawling, inefficient paperwork teeming with spooky weirdos (zombies, mummies, the long-dead in numerous states of decay, the newly arrived victims of each possible gory mishap, and naturally the titular demon spirit, performed with gonzo relish by Michael Keaton). The foundations by which this underworld functioned could not have been solely clear—in 21^st-century phrases, it was not a triumph of “worldbuilding”—however the visible and auditory pleasures it provided, with the assistance of ingenious puppetry and prosthetics and all that the late Eighties needed to supply when it comes to sensible results, had been greater than sufficient to represent a whole Tim Burton expertise.

Within the three and a half many years since, the Burton expertise has change into a model (to not point out a seasonal attraction at Disney theme parks)—and never essentially one reliably denoting high quality. After a run of good-to-excellent films within the ’90s (Batman and Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wooden), Burton turned a prolific director of big-budget CGI-crammed schlock, at instances seeming to parody his personal over-the-top fashion as he participated within the IP-mining pattern at its worst (Planet of the Apes, Alice in Wonderland, Dumbo). There have been exceptions, like his charming 2012 remake of his personal early stop-motion quick Frankenweenie, nevertheless it’s honest to say that even in a few of his most commercially profitable ventures of the previous 20 years or so, Burton has hardly ever appeared energized by the fabric—which has typically made his work extra enervating than invigorating to observe.

That’s why it was so refreshing to stroll into Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and discover myself entertained, amused, and, if not precisely scared, completely grossed out by the gnarly imaginativeness of its paranormal world-within-a-world. The script, credited to Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, and Seth Grahame-Smith, exhibits indicators of being the results of a number of drafts over the 30-plus years since a sequel was first proposed: It incorporates no fewer than 4 separate storylines and comprises complete characters (like a dead-actor-turned-cop-in-the-afterlife, performed by an all-in Willem Dafoe) that might simply have been lower with out affecting the plot—however then you definately wouldn’t have Willem Dafoe with half his cranium lacking staging a raid on a graveyard with a zombie SWAT crew.

But regardless of its overstuffed story, the sequel has a satisfying simplicity about it. If not fairly as jaunty because the 92-minute-long authentic, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice strikes alongside properly at 104 minutes. Burton understands what the Beetlejuice-loving viewers needs (Keaton stirring up supernatural chaos, Winona Ryder glowering in goth-girl stylish, bounce scares with eyeballs coming out of heads) and offers it in cheerful abundance, with out subjecting us to prolonged origin tales or cumbersome expositions of franchise lore.

The movie does embrace just a few quick flashbacks to determine how numerous characters met their finish, beginning with a intelligent claymation sequence that lays out the grim destiny of Charles Deetz (performed within the authentic by Jeffrey Jones, now a convicted intercourse offender who is among the few core solid members to not return). Catherine O’Hara is again as Charles’ now-widow Delia Deetz, as soon as the despised stepmother of Ryder’s disaffected teen Lydia. A technology later, the 2 ladies have come to tolerate one another for the sake of Lydia’s personal teenage daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega). Lydia, whose paranormal talents as soon as enabled her to be the one one in her household to see ghosts, now works as an expert “psychic mediator,” the host of a sensationalist TV present about real-life haunted homes. Nonetheless traumatized by the long-ago haunting of her family residence, Lydia is one thing of a neurotic mess, pushed half in opposition to her will into an engagement along with her oleaginous producer Rory (Justin Theroux) and rejected by her daughter as a delusional fraud. However followers of the glum, death-obsessed Lydia Deetz—and of the comeback in recent times of the too-long-unseen Ryder—shall be happy to know that Lydia nonetheless has pointy black bangs, an enviable classic wardrobe, and allure to burn. We all know instantly {that a} slick phony like Rory isn’t ok for Lydia, as a result of truthfully, who might be?

This growth of the Beetlejuice-iverse comprises some new characters as properly, notably Delores (performed by Monica Bellucci, the worldwide star who’s now additionally Burton’s girlfriend), a onetime Italian aristocrat who has spent a lot of the afterlife chopped up and packed into separate picket crates. In a bravura early scene, her long-separated element elements handle to interrupt free and reunite one after the other as she painstakingly staples herself again collectively. The film has no scarcity of this type of grody sight gag: as earlier than, the ready rooms of the afterlife are stuffed with contemporary corpses whose bodily state tells us all the pieces we have to find out about their final moments on earth, together with however not restricted to a man who died mid-hot-dog-eating contest.

Regardless of the title’s doubling of the identify of its louche antihero, Beetlejuice the character is much less central to the sequel than the anxious however well-intentioned Lydia, who because the movie begins can’t fairly get a deal with on why her life feels so out of her management. With out getting too self-serious about its central “trauma plot,” Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is at coronary heart a narrative a few middle-aged girl coming to phrases along with her grief, that includes a mother-daughter arc whose decision, which might have been soppy, really feels earned. When a flirtation with a bookish neighborhood boy (Arthur Conti) will get Lydia’s daughter Astrid blended up in supernatural shenanigans, Lydia should descend into the underworld, Orpheus-style, to rescue her. This offers not solely a high-stakes motive for an prolonged chase sequence, however an excuse to go to a wild profusion of afterlife landscapes, from a surrealistic desert stuffed with black-and-white-striped sandworms to a disco-dancer-packed Soul Prepare.

I don’t imply to overpraise Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which is basically only a better-than-expected legacy sequel with its coronary heart in the suitable place. However with the robust craft contributions of previous Burton collaborators like costume designer Colleen Atwood and manufacturing designer Mark Scruton—and due to a zippy rating by Burton’s near-constant collaborator Danny Elfman, who has solely ever not scored three Burton options—Burton appears, for the primary time in a very long time, to be really having fun with himself behind the digicam. Additionally key to the movie’s success are the performances from comedian actors as top-notch as Keaton, who invests his repellent ghoul with an anarchic charisma all his personal, and the at all times sensible Catherine O’Hara, whose each different line studying acquired an audible chuckle on the advance screening I attended. That screening was attended by numerous younger followers in full Beetlejuice cosplay: Lydias in lengthy black coats and zig-zag bangs, Beetlejuices in neon-green fright wigs and zebra-striped fits, corpses in various states of decay. {That a} 36-year-old film can nonetheless encourage that diploma of viewers funding from viewers not but born when it got here out is sufficient to make you imagine in sequels once more—or at the very least to make you welcome the return of some good Tim Burton, simply in time for spooky season.