• Courtesy Of Parisa Taghizadeh/Warner Bros.
• Beetlejuice hasn't given up on romancing a now-middle-aged Lydia Deetz in Tim Burton's belated sequel.

Tim Burton's 1988 movie Beetlejuice put the hamlet of East Corinth, Vt., on the pop cultural map. For decades, fans made pilgrimages to the site of the hilltop farmhouse that young marrieds Barbara and Adam Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) haunted in the film after their tragic demise on a covered bridge.

Then, in summer 2023, Hollywood returned. The farmhouse and the covered bridge were rebuilt. For a whirlwind few days of exterior shooting, East Corinth became Winter River, Conn., again.

Now Vermonters can see the result. Burton's belated sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, roared into theaters over the weekend and collected $110 million, making it a bona fide blockbuster. Financially, at least, reviving this corpse was the right idea.

The deal

Thirty-six years after the events of the first film, the ghosts of the Maitlands no longer haunt Winter River. They've gone into the light with the help of their friend Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), now a widowed celebrity medium who hosts a TV show called "Ghost House."

Lydia returns to the Connecticut farmhouse for her dad's funeral, bringing along her mooching boyfriend, Rory (Justin Theroux), and her sullen teen daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega of "Wednesday"). She commiserates about the trials of motherhood with her stepmom, conceptual artist Delia Deetz (Catherine O'Hara), whose outrageousness hasn't waned over the years.

Meanwhile, stuck in the Afterlife, trickster demon Betelgeuse-pronounced-Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) hasn't given up on his plan to wed Lydia and establish himself permanently in the land of the living. One little wrinkle: He has an evil ex-wife (Monica Bellucci) who literally sucks souls, and she's back and eager to make him pay for hacking her up with an ax.

Between Delia's funeral antics, Rory's push to tie the knot and Astrid's Halloween date with an emo boy (Arthur Conti), Lydia has plenty to worry about. One thing's for sure: If she gets desperate enough to summon Beetlejuice for supernatural help, all hell will break loose.

Will you like it?

"The Afterlife is so random," Astrid tells her mom with an eye roll at one point. That commentary could be applied to much of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice — but randomness has its entertaining side.

The original Beetlejuice worked so well because it contrasted the vanilla sweetness and sincerity of the Maitlands and their town with the colorful chaos of the Deetz family — and then with the über-chaos of Beetlejuice. Toward the end, when the chaos (and the costumes and special effects) took over, the movie got a little tiring. That's doubly true of the sequel, which has so many intersecting plotlines that madness reigns from the get-go.

No sooner have we reunited with Lydia — and grasped that she needs to ditch Rory yesterday — than we're whisked off to the Afterlife to meet Bellucci's character, an antagonist who's not much fun. I didn't even mention the ghostly detective (Willem Dafoe) on the soul sucker's trail, a deceased actor promoted from merely playing cops in life, who has comic baggage and accessories of his own.

Astrid is less a character in her own right than a composite of the younger Lydia and Wednesday Addams. But she, too, has her own arc, complete with a dead dad to mourn. Amid all these supporting characters, we never really connect with Lydia as a protagonist — which is a shame, because Ryder's performance has matured from teen snark into a more interesting adult ruefulness.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice resembles a big, sloppy school pageant put on by a bunch of theater kids who all insist on having juicy scenes to play, orchestrated by a director who embraces the cacophony. Yet it is considerably more endearing than Burton's other frenetic recent blockbusters (Dumbo, Dark Shadows, Alice in Wonderland), because it's less dependent on computer-generated magic.

The German expressionist-inspired aesthetic of the Afterlife remains intact, with the dead characters sporting stylized wounds and maimings that suggest Halloween costumes whipped up by the craftiest parent on the block. There's no attempt at realism or at cutesifying. While Beetlejuice could use more screen time, he retains his edge and does not (thank all the dark gods) become anyone's father figure. He even gets to cuss a bit, inflict a poetically apt punishment on a church full of influencers and lip-synch "MacArthur Park" with a giant melting wedding cake as a visual aid.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is rife with dad jokes, some of which land and some of which don't. (A "Soul Train" that takes spirits to the Great Beyond is exactly as disco-powered as you'd expect.) But this franchise began as a quirky original project that Burton championed, and you can still feel the love. My favorite scene was the sunny, nostalgic one in which Astrid bikes past all the landmarks of Winter River/East Corinth. Even in this overstuffed fantasia, the simple joys of "cozy horror" are alive and well.

MARGOT HARRISON

If you like this, try...

Beetlejuice (1988; Max, rentable): Rewatch it to marvel at how Burton managed to keep Lydia's dad in the sequel without employing original actor (and convicted sex offender) Jeffrey Jones. As for Baldwin and Davis, they were written out because they would have required digital de-aging.

El Conde (2023; Netflix): If you wish the whole movie resembled the trippy black-and-white, subtitled flashback to Beetlejuice's past, watch this hidden gem from Pablo Larraín, which satirically reimagines Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a vampire.

The House With a Clock in Its Walls (2018; rentable): On the other hand, if you're looking for more tween-friendly horror set in a charming small town, you could do worse than this adaptation of John Bellairs' classic kids' novel.