I didn’t see the original Beetlejuice but I read a review of this sequel which said I didn’t have to in order to enjoy Tim Burton’s latest imaginative cinematic excess.  ‘N plus I went with a younger person who’d seen the original at an even younger age in a state of chemically-enhanced appreciation, shall we say, and who therefore harboured a sentimental hankering for the sequel. 

After a family tragedy, three generations of the Deetz family return home to Winter River.  Still haunted by Beetlejuice, Lydia’s life is turned upside down when her teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega), accidentally opens the portal to the afterlife.

I nicked that synopsis from the cinema program, because I couldn’t think how to otherwise summarise the set-up, let alone the plot, of this movie. 

The plot isn’t important anyway.  This is Tim Burton indulging himself in his usual comedy horror grotesqueries, along the way name-checking and poking fun at countless cinematic tropes and cliches with countless visual puns and gags. 

Let’s see.  There’s The Addams Family (the disembodied hand), Trainspotting (baby crawling across the ceiling), Dune (sandworms), Alien (horrific birth) and Rosemary’s Baby (devil child).

There are dream sequences, musical interludes and a nod to noirish cop flicks.  Willem Defoe has fun as a classic Hollywood tough cop trying to run underworld intruders out of town. 

Burton takes aim at bureaucracies (at least I think that’s what he’s doing) by having the underworld run by zombie-like men in suits with shrunken heads.  Influencers get a comeuppance.  Hooray.  I liked that bit.

There’s a cast of thousands led by Michael Keaton reprising his role as Beetlejuice.  I suppose he gets brownie points for keeping up the manic energy at his age.  Winona Ryder is Lydia, Catherine O’Hara is her mother, Monica Bellucci plays the soul-sucking Delores and ….that’s all I can think of to say about the casting and acting.   

It was episodically entertaining, but I found the frantic pace and narrative chaos a bit wearying and in the end it was all just a bit ho-hum.  And a bit too meta for my taste.  Maybe that’s just me being old again.  My companion liked it.  She thought maybe I would have benefited from watching the first one but I’m not going to do that, even if it’s free-to-air on Youtube by now. Life’s too short. 

But if you like this kind of thing, I believe it’s already on Stan.