Grave Humor: BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE

Now here’s a welcome surprise—a belated sequel that’s more a cause for celebration than for cynicism. The movie is Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a late-arriving sequel to 1988’s Beetlejuice. (It’s fun that there are few ways to discuss that fact without summoning the eponymous ghoul.) And, contrary to current trends in legacy sequels, this isn’t some lengthy, ponderous brand extension. It’s just more Beetlejuice, which finds the characters from the original simply experiencing more Beetlejuice in their lives.The movie doesn’t meaningfully add to a mythos (though we get a stylish origin-story black-and-white foreign-language flashback to the ‘Juice’s death). It’s simply gleefully and grotesquely itself—a cheerfully mean comedy about the afterlife careening into one family’s actual life. Here’s Winona Ryder’s Goth teen all grown up—and now with her own disaffected daughter (Jenna Ortega—a perfect Burton performer with her wide eyes and flat affect). They’re called back to the family ghost house by the matriarch (Catherine O’Hara) upon the death of her husband. (Extra-textually a gigglingly gorily appropriate killing-off.) There, wouldn’t you know it, they just might need the horn-dog demonic Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) to work a Faustian bargain to fix their problems. The result is an energetic throwback, both to the original and to a time when sequels were content to just serve up more of the same.

By doing so, it’s also an occasion to find director Tim Burton at long last back at peak Burton—mischievous, macabre, and mocking. (Of course a bureaucratic purgatory is a cartoon nightmare, and there’s plenty of haunted satire to small town life and big city pretensions, too.) He’s his most himself in a way he hasn’t fully unleashed in nearly two decades. Us Burton auteurists forged in the golden days of Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns and Ed Wood and Mars Attacks and Big Fish and Sweeney Todd could still find some glimmers of fun here (Dark Shadows’ Gothic goofiness) and there (Big Eyes’ kitschy exaggeration). But even then it felt like the early edge he had was sanded down and his unbounded imagination suddenly bound. Here he is back in full prickliness and earnest eccentricity again, with wit and vigor. Every kooky corner is chockablock with vintage Burton antics, from the cockeyed production design and physical sets, all stripes and canted angles, to the frantic Elfman score and manic mayhem of all sorts of wild and wiggly gross-out effects. If nothing else, it’s a pleasurable aesthetic experience—so deeply familiar to Burton-heads it’s even comforting in its discomforts.

A riot of old-school techniques—stop-motion animation, puppets, models, animatronics, squibs—are married seamlessly to digital exaggerations and embellishments and put to use for madcap Looney Tunes logic and Fangoria fetishes. Corpses shamble about missing chunks from shark bites, growing moss, bulging with puss and gore. A dead actor (Willem Dafoe) struts about missing the side of his skull so bits of brain show through. A gorgeous dismembered witch (Monica Bellucci) staples herself back together so she can resume sucking souls. (She discards the empty bodies like flaccid water balloons.) The plot piles on these grotesquely cartoony ghostly dilemmas to ping off funny, but sincerely felt, family melodrama, leading to a fine, freaky scurry through a complicated finale that crisscrosses the lands of the living and the dead. This is an eruption of inspiration and imagination all the way, overstuffed and overflowing with a blend of the serious and silly, from a chalk-outline bomb exploding, to a recurring Dostoyevsky motif, a possessed disco song-and-dance number, and a literal Soul Train complete with a Don Cornelius lookalike as conductor to seal the pun. The whole production is on this level of manic entertainment, a delight from beginning to end, a quirky effects comedy about nothing but its style and itself. But what a great self, and one only Burton could bring. It’s nice to see him again at last.