Beetlejuice is back, in a supernatural screwball sequel

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Turns out Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) hasn't changed much in 30-odd years — he's less of a villain, but still a pain in the neck. / Warner Bros. Pictures

The impish demon known as Beetlejuice has been dead for centuries, but he’s enjoyed a pretty long life in popular culture. Tim Burton’s hit film spawned a trippy animated TV series, which I happily devoured as a kid in the late ’80s, and, more recently, a Beetlejuice stage musical that’s now touring the U.S. Even so, I wasn’t hankering for a sequel to the Burton movie, which might have turned out to be just another fan-servicing, nostalgia-milking cash grab.

Fortunately, there isn’t a whiff of cynicism to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Burton shows real affection for the first film’s characters and genuine curiosity about how they’re doing three decades or so later. Winona Ryder is back as Lydia Deetz, who escaped Beetlejuice’s clutches as a teenager; now she’s a paranormal expert with her own talk show.

Lydia has long since buried the hatchet with her artist stepmother, Delia — the sublime Catherine O’Hara. But she’s having a tougher time with her own teenage daughter, Astrid — that’s Jenna Ortega from the show Wednesday, whose creators, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, wrote this movie.

When Lydia’s father dies suddenly, the family reunites at their old Connecticut home for the funeral. It’s here that Lydia accidentally winds up summoning Beetlejuice, thanks in part to her sleaze of a fiancé, played by Justin Theroux. With a sudden whoosh, Beetlejuice is back — played by Michael Keaton with the same messy green hair, rotting teeth and mischievous streak as before.

Lydia winds up joining forces with Beetlejuice, begging him to help her after Astrid falls into a trap and gets sucked into the underworld. But Beetlejuice has worries of his own. Centuries ago, when he was still alive, he married a woman named Delores, played by a witchy Monica Bellucci. Things didn’t end well, and now Delores is back and stalking him.

It’s a silly twist and a fairly inconsequential part of the breezy, anything-goes plot. But that breeziness is part of the movie’s charm. Like its predecessor, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is basically a supernatural screwball rom-com, in which marriage is never a matter of “’til death do us part.” The movie is refreshingly unsentimental about love, whether it’s Astrid getting hoodwinked by a teenage crush or Lydia being courted by not one but two unsavory suitors.

Beetlejuice is less of a villain this time around, though, as played by a fast-talking, shapeshifting Keaton, he’s still a pain in the neck. He hasn’t really changed much in 30-odd years; in the afterlife, that’s a drop in the bucket. But the living characters have changed, in interesting ways. Delia, no longer just a sculptor but a multimedia artist, is mellower than before, though O’Hara gives her a dash of dottiness, perhaps channeling her Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek. Lydia, played with such moody self-possession by Ryder in the first film, is now a bundle of nerves, determined to save her daughter and their relationship at any cost.

At a certain point, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice becomes a kind of hellish door-slamming farce, with multiple characters hurtling through portals between the realms of the living and the dead. But while the movie can be distractingly busy, it never feels frenetic or exhausting.

The underworld production design is ravishingly grim, and some of the sight gags — like when a dismembered corpse reassembles itself using a staple gun — are as exquisite as they are grisly. And for all the state-of-the-art technique on display, the movie retains a hand-crafted look that feels rooted in the original.

The result may not reach the first film’s darkly funny heights, but then, to his credit, Burton seems more interested in updating than duplicating his earlier achievement. There is, however, one scene — a lovely choral performance of Harry Belafonte’s calypso classic "Day-O" — that nicely calls back to the first movie’s most memorable moment. It was enough to make me imagine the late, great Belafonte himself hanging out with the various misshapen denizens of this fantasy afterlife — and having, to his surprise as well as mine, a remarkably good time.