By M. Faust

Burdened as I am by what my wife calls an irrational expectation that movies should make sense, I was never a big fan of “Beetlejuice” Tim Burton’s second feature film. Sure, there was much to like within it: a manic performance by Michael Keaton (that you just know Jim Carrey studied endlessly), a party of prim dinner guests turned into human marionettes to dance to “Day-O”, Danny Elfman’s rambunctious score, and Geena Davis. 

But horror movies, even comical ones, are designed as games: the rules are laid out—vampires can only come out at night, they suck the blood of the living, and they can be killed by driving stakes through their heats—and we expect them to abide by them, or at least warn us when they are being adjusted. 

I rewatched Beetlejuice over the weekend and realized what all of you who are shaking your heads at my stodginess have long understood, that its charm lies in its utter lack of grounding in reality. 

(Well, perhaps not “utter”—it’s no Un Chien Andalou, which was constructed of randomly assembled images that Salvador Dali and Luis Bunel pulled from their dreams. Legend has it that if, as they were editing, they found any consecutive images that appeared to make sense, they removed one or both of them. But I digress.) 

Trained as an animator and reputedly afflicted by bipolar disorder, Burton was drawn to filmmaking for its imagistic possibilities rather than its storytelling ones. His poorest films are the one that are most plot reliant, like the 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes. So if he wants to rebuild sets from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or invent scenes from a movie that Mario Bava might have made but never did, well, why should the plot stand in his way? 

He does both of these things, and many more, in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” which is certainly the most enjoyable Burton film since—well, in a long time. Set 35 years after the events of the original film, the story follows Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), who has turned her ability to see dead people into a successful television career. Sadly, this ability does not let her get in touch with her late husband. Nor does it endear her to her teenaged daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega, TV’s “Wednesday.”) 

Astrid is as troublesome to her mother as Lydia was to her stepmother Delia (the wonderful Catherine O’Hara), still making a living with ego-driven works of pseudo-art. The death of Lydia’s father brings all three of them back to the Winter River house that he so loved for his memorial service. It also brings them back into the purview of “bioexorcist” Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton, of course) who still wants to marry Lydia. 

Why? Well, there’s that plot question again. This sequel doesn’t make a lot more sense than did the original, and you’re only going to frustrate yourself trying to get it to do so. 

Burton’s first love was stop-motion animation. Inevitably, that is augmented here by CGI, but only sporadically: There are substantial credits for animatronic and stop motion effects. At the other end of the spectrum is Beetlejuice’s office staff, a bunch of guys with shrunken heads who, when we seem them running around, are so obviously actors in oversized jackets covering their real heads—a classic effect used in movies with no effects budget—that Burton has to have done it as a joke. 

What else, what else: There’s a teen romance subplot that is fortunately not what it initially seems to be. There are characters played by Willem DaFoe and Monica Bellucci that could have been completely cut from the movie without making very much difference. There is a climactic scene that features the best hijacking of a classic pop song since Kingsman: The Secret Service—I won’t tell you what it is because that would ruin it. 

For a film comedy designed for the biggest possible mass audience (it is playing at every single theater in the 716 area except the North Park), Beetlejuice Beetlejuice does have some surprisingly dark undercurrents. It’s vision of the afterlife is played for laughs but is also inescapably bleak. Keaton’s performance doesn’t vary much from the original film—who would want it to?—but he is often filmed in close-ups that make the character more sinister than comical.

Lydia, who came through the first film to a place of joy, doesn’t so much find happiness here as she becomes resigned to her middle-aged place in life. It’s a first-rate performance by Winona Ryder, an actress who hasn’t gotten enough chances to show what she can do aside from being the face of Hollywood goth. It seems likely that there will be a third film: maybe she’ll get her happy ending there. 

(A post script, likely of no interest to anyone but myself, that will not be included on the test: The part of Father Damien is played by the British actor Burn Gorman, whose name you probably won’t recognize unless you’re an obsessive credits-reader. In 2011 he starred in a Scottish film I saw at a film festival called Up There, in which he played a post-terrestrial worker tasked with helping the newly dead adjust.

The premise is vaguely similar to Beetlejuice, though otherwise the two have little in common. It was a delightful movie, comic and philosophical, and I have never met anyone else who saw it: it was never released in the US, has apparently never been issued on DVD, and can’t been streamed anywhere. On the basis of Gorman’s casting here, however, I’ll bet that Burton, who has lived in England for most of the past few decades, saw it and enjoyed it as much as I did.) 

M. Faust is a veteran film critic and a contributor to The Buffalo Hive.