Beetlejuice Beetlejuice review – Tim Burton sequel takes retro joyride through old haunts

Venice film festival
Burton’s game attempt to bring the 1980s horror-comedy back from the spirit world is full of gaudy set-pieces but fails to add much to the original

The Venice film festival, the oldest event on the circuit, likes to make the most of its past, with vintage stills in the lobby and antique retrospectives in the smaller theatres. Away from the main programme it is a veritable ghost town, a bubbling afterlife of cinematic history. On rare occasions, its spectres gatecrash the red carpet as well. Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the opening film of the 81st edition, is a game attempt to reanimate the bones of the director’s beloved 1988 horror-comedy, even if its line in shock tactics feel a trifle worn this time around, like something plucked from the rack of a small-town thrift shop. The hyperventilating plot doesn’t help matters. In spinning his tale of the living and the dead, Burton throws in sandworms and showtunes and a soul train to the great beyond, perhaps reasoning that if one gaudy set-piece doesn’t snag our attention, have no fear: there will be another, just as gaudy, 30 seconds down the line.

Winona Ryder reprises her role as Lydia Deetz, the plucky goth heroine from the original picture. Lydia is now a middle-aged psychic, flushed with the success of a tacky TV show but saddled with a fiance called Rory (Justin Theroux), whose man bun and new age blather immediately signify that he’s a wrong ’un. Revisiting her home town of Winter River for Halloween, Lydia is taunted by reminders of that old trickster demon (Michael Keaton), and desperately toils to safeguard her family. “If you say his name three times, he appears,” she warns. Rory, the doofus, promptly obliges. He does so, he says, because he is into trauma therapy.

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