Back in 1988, “Beetlejuice” was a comedy, a ghost story, a high-camp horror film, and a macabre funhouse ride, all driven by a new kind of palm-buzzer freak-show prankishness. I first saw the movie at a Saturday-night sneak preview, before anyone knew a thing about it, and by the time it was over it was clear that the director, Tim Burton, was going to be a superstar who ruled over his own weirdly ardent world of ghoulish mockery.
Burton, when he was 26, had directed “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” but “Beetlejuice,” though in some ways a ramshackle cartoon of a movie, had a force at work in it. You might say that “Beetlejuice” was a vibe. The vision of the afterlife as a waiting room of gonzo wax-museum horrors; the moment when those shrimp leapt off the plate in the spectacular “Day-O” musical demonic-possession sequence; and Michael Keaton’s feral, jabbering, Groucho-Marx-meets-oozing-derelict performance as Beetlejuice the grotty bio-exorcist — the movie channeled a spirit that wasn’t just loopy, it was hilariously insane.
It’s the nature of the brand that Tim Burton became that as you watch “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” his let’s-revisit-all-that-36-years-later-because-why-the-hell-not sequel that opened the Venice Film Festival today, you can just about see him at work, putting the pieces together, trying to recapture the old Burton cracked-gothic lightning in a bottle. One of those pieces is the image of Monica Bellucci as Delores, a ghost who’s been hacked to pieces and is laying dormant in different boxes, as she literally pulls and staples her body parts together (sawed-off torso, legs and arms, face that’s been cut in half), all to the tune of the Bee Gees’ “Tragedy,” which sort of half makes sense — I guess there’s supposed to be something tragic about her? — but that mostly just works as an ideal demented needle drop. She then wanders around sucking out the souls of the dead, which renders them really dead. (Did I mention that she’s Beetlejuice’s ex-wife? It’s complicated.)
“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” begins awkwardly, with Burton setting up his characters as if they were part of some “Beetlejuice” board game. As it goes on, though, the pieces start to come together in much the same way that Delores’ face and body does. The movie is just a lightweight riff on “Beetlejuice” — a piece of fan service, really. It doesn’t give you the full monster-kitsch jolt that the original film had. Yet there’s good fan service and bad, and as stilted and gimcracky as it can sometimes be, I had a pretty good time at “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” Burton’s once-skewed way of looking at the world long ago got baked into ours (that’s one reason he has struggled, at times, to give his movies that same buzz). But if “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is mostly a lark, kind of like the current hit Broadway version of “Beetlejuice,” part of what the new movie delivers is honest nostalgia for the moment when Burton’s clown-spirit-from-hell sensibility still had a frisson of shock value.
As a result, it’s one of those sequels that spends a lot of time looking back. The film opens with the tingle of Danny Elfman’s jumpy ghost music, along with another flyover shot of the picturesque town of Winter River, Connecticut, where Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz, the former goth teen who interfaced with the spirit world, is now a psychic mediator who hosts her own hunt-for-the-paranormal television show entitled “Ghost House.” Lydia still wears her hair in spiky bangs, but where you might expect her to have relaxed into middle age, the way Ryder plays her she’s more distraught than ever. Maybe that’s because her TV-producer boyfriend, Rory (Justin Theroux), is a fatuous sleaze who speaks in therapeutic gobbledygook to cover his flagrant opportunism. Or maybe it’s because her daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), has nothing but contempt for her mother’s ghostly preoccupations, which she thinks are sheer delusion.
Catherine O’Hara is back as Delia, Lydia’s narcissistic artist stepmother. And to spin past any awkwardness over former cast member Jeffrey Jones (who is now a convicted sex offender), his character, Charles — Lydia’s father and Delia’s husband — is given an animated segment that ends with him being chomped by a shark; the character then spends the rest of the movie skulking through the afterlife as a blood-spurting trunk without a head. As for Keaton’s title pest, he keeps popping up in Lydia’s sightlines, and it’s not long before he’s summoned. Keaton, at 73, invests him with that same obscene gnashing energy and throwaway scuzzball cunning — and, in fact, Beetlejuice figures out another way to coerce Lydia into marrying him. It’s all hooked to the fact that Astrid has fallen for a sweetheart of a dude in her class (Arthur Conti), who turns out to have a very dark secret.
The movie doesn’t come entirely alive until the scene where Beetlejuice, acting as Lydia and Rory’s
“couple’s therapist,” literally spills his guts, then produces an infant version of himself — a baby as disquieting as the crawling-on-the-ceiling one in “Trainspotting.” A gambit like this exists mostly for its own agreeably sick sake, and that, in its way, is the “Beetlejuice” aesthetic: Tim Burton making this stuff up simply because it tickles his naughty fancy. At least one thing he has made up is a bit cringe: the punning use of “Soul Train,” complete with a boogie-down chorus line of ’70s funk dancers (which in the movie becomes a train for dead souls — get it?). And the plot has even more of the balsa-wood quality that the Alec Baldwin/Geena Davis ghost plot in “Beetlejuice” had.
After a while, though, the conceits start to gather gusto and chime together, whether it’s Bob, the pop-eyed shrunken head in a full body suit, presiding over an office army of Bobs; or Willem Dafoe digging into the cheesiness of Wolf Jackson, a former B-movie actor, now with the left side of his brain exposed (the result of a grenade accident), who heads the afterlife police force but does it like he’s still acting in a bad movie; or the film’s cheeky homages to the black-and-white era of Mario Bava and to the dreamy anxiety of “Carrie”; or the hypnotic gem of inspired lunacy that Burton brings off, during the climactic wedding sequence, by using Richard Harris’s 1968 rendition of “MacArthur Park.” “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is no “Beetlejuice,” but in the end it’s got just enough Burton juice.
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