REVIEW. "Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice! Why You Jive Talkin', Man?"

I must admit I was never a huge fan of Tim Burton's original 1988 Goth comedy. Except for Michael Keaton's curmudgeonly irreverent title character (which, at the time, seemed like a wildly offbeat variation of Jack Nicholson in The Shining), and one fine dinner table possession scene set to the syncopation of Harry Belafonte's Day-O, Beetlejuice would hardly make my list of ground-breaking comedies.

It was, of course, one of Tim Burton's many treatises on life and the undead (think Corpse Bride, Sleepy Hollow, Dark Shadows, Sweeney Todd). It seems like everything Tim Burton touches turns to black, underscored by a healthy dose of gallows humor. I'll never forget Johnny Depp deadpanning, "That's the ugliest woman I've ever scene," when first he lays eyes on Alice Cooper in Dark Shadows. But that line, like many throwaways embedded in Burton's movies, reminds me of the hit-or-miss impact his fascination with all things dead (and un) has had on the film industry.

My personal favorite of among Burton's pantheon of spookiness is 1990's Edward Scissorhands, the poignant and tragic tale of a humanoid misfit (Johnny Depp) whose freakish appearance belies a gentle soul and creative spirit. That's when I thought Burton was really onto something, that his affection for misfits and outcasts was putting him on an interesting path of self-revelation and introspection about being human. But then Burton started moving toward bigger projects with larger budgets and more CGI than Beetlejuice could ever devour, and the quality and depth of his movies suffered as a result.

Arguably, Burton has not made a really good film since 1994's Ed Wood, an absolutely first-rate, fascinatingly moody biopic of real-life grade B movie director Wood - Remember Planet 9 from Outer Space? No? You are not alone. - that featured a restrained Depp, a pre-Sex and the City angora-clad Sarah Jessica Parker, and a Best Supporting Actor turn from Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi. The problem is almost nobody saw Ed Wood, despite its critical acclaim, presumably because it did not feature the kinds of over-the-top human (or unhuman) situations or characters that Burton had been using to animate his moribund comedies.

So why more Beetlejuice, and why now?

The obviously glib answer is money. In a post-pandemic age of Marvel comics franchises, Burton never took advantage of the 80s cult classic whose title character became not only a household name, but a a meme synonymous with cinema's most mischievous, if deviant bio-exorcist this side of Arthur Fleck (aka Joker). With only seventeen minutes of screen time in the original film, Keaton took what could have been a mildly amusing predator from the after-life into a grunting, lustful ghoul whose apparent disgust at being undead is matched only by his cunning ability to slither into the psyches of the living.

In truth, Beetlejuice 2 has been in the making ever since the success of the 1988 original but, as Burton and Keaton almost immediately after its release made two Batman movies, then moved on to other, separate projects, the sequel was shelved, and a draft script titled "Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian" was scrapped. Dare I say, probably with good reason.

A few years ago, Burton reportedly started thinking about Beetlejuice's love interest, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), and where she might be thirty-odd years later. Lydia, a teenager who could see dead people long before Haley Joel Osment (in 1999's The Sixth Sense), is really a stand-in for Burton himself, providing the vehicle by which the director articulates his views about death, in much the same way that Anne Rice's Lestat became her surrogate (and voice for her daughter Michelle who died from leukemia), saying she was a "sad, broken, desperate atheist" when she penned her classic novel Interview With a Vampire (1976).

So Burton resurrected Lydia, and also checked to see if some of the original actors might be available for another spin at the Winter River estate, and off they went! But Burton must have been musing about something more than just Lydia's paranormal gift, as he also returns to the music of his youth: disco! Of all the things I suspected I might encounter in an excessively campy sequel, groovin' through some thoroughly macabre scenes scored to the syncopated disco beat of the Bee Gees and Donna Summer was not among them. More on that in a minute.

First, the plot: a now widowed mother, Lydia makes her living as the host of a TV show called Ghost House, where she helps frightened residents exorcist unwanted spirits from their homes. She's engaged to the show's parasitic producer Rory (Justin Theroux) and estranged from her daughter Astrid (Jenny Ortega), who rejects all of Lydia's paranormal skills. Astrid is still angry about her father's accidental death, and she can't figure out why, of all the strangers' spirits Lydia can see, she cannot seem to visualize or connect with her late, if estranged, husband.

When Lydia's father Charles dies suddenly (told in animated flashback, as actor Jeffrey Jones, who played Charles in the original film, has not been employed in theater, film or television since his 2002 arrest as a sex offender), Lydia scoops up Astrid and they head back to Winter River with Astrid's long-contentious, faux-artist stepmother Delia (Catherine O'Hara, also reprising her role from the original movie).

Predictably, chaos - and lots of ghosts - accompany the three women to the creepy family estate, now shrouded in gauzy black crepe. Astrid explores her mom's old neighborhood and meets a charming and smart boy her own age who, as it turns out, is really dead and waiting to exchange Astrid's soul for his own. Do we sense a mother-daughter affinity for the supernatural?

Lydia realizes she must then conjure up her old adversary, Beetlejuice, to help her, but his assistance, of course, comes at a price: He is still determined to make Lydia his bride. Desperate, she agrees.

Unfortunately, Beetlejuice has problems of his own, as his centuries-old deceased wife Delores (Monica Bellucci) has re-animated herself, and is now looking to (literally) "suck the life" out her ex. Apparently, if you die as an member of the undead, you're gone for good. Rules. The return of a Handbook for the Recently Deceased, the "Bible" that provides guidance for those recently departed, seems ripe, once again, with all kinds of policies and procedures for the underworld. So many that it's hard to keep track, but enough to move the plot forward and wrap up some loose ends at the end.

In what may be the movie's funniest scene, Delores, who suffered death by dismemberment, staples herself back together to the pulsating beat of the Bee Gee's 1979 hit "Tragedy." I wasn't sure if I could contain my laughter or my feet as the song brought back happy memories of my own college days when I secretly choreographed disco dances in my parents' basement. No doubt the people sitting next to me thought I was possessed... or something. Fun times, for sure, and Burton maximizes the music and its incongruent juxtaposition against Delores' gholish revival.

Amidst Lydia's frantic quest to save Astrid's soul and Beetlejuice's renewed lust for the teenager who never became his paramour, Burton delivers a fast-paced race to salvation, complete with shrunken heads, exploding guts, and the return of the giant snake worm. There is even a Soul Train complete with the show's signature disco dancers, waiting to depart for... Heaven? The afterlife? Burton doesn't say, though the dancers suggest a happy journey. This sequence, which Burton comes back to as Astrid gets closer to boarding the train, becomes an almost poignant, if eerie, homage to both the 70s TV show and to Soul Train host Don Cornelius, whose image is seen here as the conductor of the soul-to-paradise transport: Cornelius died by suicide in 2012.

The movie's various plot threads come together in a fantasy wedding sequence that features all the characters inhabited by the spirit of disco queen Donna Summer singing composer/poet Jimmy Webb's forever elusive, enigmatic song "MacArthur Park," which may also serve as Burton's own epistle on the strange and mysterious things the world - and underworld - has to offer. Reminiscent of Milos Forman's "Hare Krishna" sequence in 1979's Hair, Beetlejuice's long-awaited nuptials with a reluctant Lydia feature floating corpses and undead musicians, a kind of ethereal, misguided love hallucination, if not for the goofy Orpheus' (Keaton) orchestrating the festivities.

Even Willem Dafoe enters the universe here, seemingly still in make-up from Poor Things and continuing to ham it up as a hammy actor who, in real-life, insisted on doing his own movie stunts and died after a mishap. A warning to Tom Cruise, or maybe just a chuckle at this year's stunt homage, The Fall Guy? Hard to say, but Dafoe may be the one addition here that wasn't totally necessary to move the plot forward. The menagerie of shrunken heads, led by Bob, and the miscellaneous undead, could have done just as well.

The main draw in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is Michael Keaton, who gets more than seventeen minutes of screen time here. He is equally crude, rude, and one unhappily dead dude, wheeling and dealing his way through the afterlife with a repulsive sliminess made tolerable only by Keaton's endearing performance.

The other characters, save Jenny Ortega who breathes genuine teenaged apathy into Astrid, are pretty stock, relying on either audience nostalgia (in the cases of Ryder and O'Hara), or comedic stereotypes (Theroux's opportunistic Rory) to sustain the narrative. Their characterizations are more caricature than human and they are here as props to Beetlejuice's show, which is not to say the movie is bad. In many ways, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has a lot more energy than the original, as Burton fills the screen with more sophisticated animation to underscore the creepy, subversive afterlife that Beetlejuice inhabits.

Before venturing out to see this thirty-six-years-in-the-making sequel, I did rewatch the original. It took me three times to get through it, as much of the then-edgy humor now seems dated and slow. Even Keaton's growling ghost didn't seem to bring the movie to life (pun intended), though I was reminded that Alec Baldwin was a very handsome young man with a very sexy voice, in spite of his geeky character. This time around, Burton hits you with a pulse early on, and movie keeps up that frenetic rhythm, for the most part, through the various plot twists and turns.

The ambiguous ending gives hope (dread?) that Burton has more Beetlejuice stories up his sleeve - or at least one whose title would correctly reflect the number of times one must chant the title character's name in order to conjure him up. At least it's unlikely we'll have to wait another three-and-a-half decades for the next installment. But then, you never know. The afterlife, together with CGI animatronix, is a funny thing.

I must admit I enjoyed the 90 or so minutes I spent in Burton and Keaton's menacingly comedic underworld. It's hard for me not to admire Burton's almost exclusive use of featured music from 1979 (save Richard Marx's "Waiting for You" from a decade later), to capture the excitement, desire, angst and confusion that defined the 1970s.

Got me wondering: what if disco really is the force that resurrects us all?

Would that be such a tragedy?

Think about it.