It's Always Showtime

1988's Beetlejuice is unique blend of visual style, humour, lite horror, performance and trappings of the decade. How to recreate this is a question sequel Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice doesn't even try to answer. Instead it throws its weird and wonderful characters into as many chaotic scenarios as Tim Burton and team can think of and do so at such a manic pace that the viewer doesn't have time to think if they are enjoying it as much. Thanks to the amount of talent on display, this method ends up working a treat.

The story begins with Winona Ryder's Lydia Deetz, now the star of a TV show where she contacts the dead, receiving the news that her father has died. Consequently, she reunites with step mother Delia (Catherine O'Hara) for a memorial service come art project back at the old family home. Accompanying the returning cast members are Lydia's daughter Jenna Ortega and new partner Justin Theroux. Ghostly couple Gina Davis and Alec Baldwin are no longer in residence (a throwaway line is all the explanation we get) but Beetlejuice is still periodically skulking around their model village with designs on reuniting with his former bride to be.

From there things move at a break-neck pace with subplots galore; Rider and Theroux have an upcoming wedding, Ortega meets a mysterious love interest in the village while butting heads with her mother and mourning her deceased father, O'Hara is doing her weird art stuff, Beetlejuice's ex wife is after him and sucking souls in the process, we follow an afterlife cop who was given the job because he played one on TV when alive. It's a lot to cram into a movie that comes in around 100 mins but it manages to accommodate it all effortlessly by adopting a dream like story structure where things just happen when they need to, regardless of logic. The rules you established in the first film getting in your way? Ignore them. Inconvenient for Beetlejuice to be on screen? Have him go to the "little boys room". Need people to handily be in the same place as each other? Make it so. The result is a story that doesn't quite hold together but it doesn't really matter, in fact it just adds to the surreal vibe of proceedings.

And surreal it is. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice may be even weirder than its predecessor with animated sequences, black and white golden age of horror homages and musical interludes.The events are equally dark but the tone is lighter, offering a pretty flippant attitude towards life and death, and it airs more on the side of out and out comedy. The unique vibe it creates allows the film to get away the things that often derail nostalgia sequels. All the call backs and fan service lines are here but worn lightly enough that it feels like they are added in the spirit of fun rather than as a painfully wedged in studio mandate. Like in say, the last Ghostbusters film. Even adding in a Beetlejuice origin story doesn't poison the well as it's done flippantly and pretty hilariously.

The returning cast slip effortlessly back into their roles and the new additions fit the world perfectly. Willem Dafoe's Hollywood cop is a blast and Justin Theroux has a great time as the slimily over-earnest new man is Lydia's life. Is Monica Bellucci here so that Burton can indulge his Frankenstein's Bride fetish by dressing up his latest partner as a hot zombie? Maybe, but it's never a bad to have Monica Bellucci in your film. We are even treated to a Danny DeVito appearance.

It's still Micheal Keaton's show of course and he doesn't miss a beat slipping back into the skin of the "bio exorcist". Wisely, he doesn't get much more screen time than he did back in 1988, keeping his impact at maximum. The film makers also avoid the trap of turning him into a good guy, however much he aids the rest of the cast we are left in doubt that allowing him to stay in the world of the living would be a disaster. He plays the hits from the first movie while adding in some new tricks and it always feels the film picks up a notch when he is on screen, which is as it should be.

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice really has no right to exist. Fortunately, it feels like it was born out of a bunch of friends desire to hang out and make something fun rather than an executive's bean counting. It may be much messier than its predecessor but it is often funny and always creative. So much fun I wouldn't even mind if they decided to let the juice loose a third time.

8 Asps de-fanged out of 10.

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