Coming 36 years later, this sequel to the director’s classic supernatural comedy is a gleefully zany farce filled with great gags and practical effects.

Betelgeuse is back from the dead. Or rather, Betelgeuse is still dead, but at least he’s back. It’s been an astonishing 36 years since Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice introduced the character, a demonic scumbag played by Michael Keaton, but Hollywood is Hollywood, and no intellectual property gets to rest in peace forever. So now Burton has directed a sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which opened the Venice Film Festival.

I can’t say I had high expectations; the last time an ’80s supernatural comedy got a sequel after a decades-long wait, the results were disappointing. Ghostbusters: Afterlife. So it’s a relief to report that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice seems more like a weirder, gorier, and overall slimier equivalent of Top Gun: Maverick. That is, it’s a sequel that came out 36 years later, pays an intelligent and loving tribute to its predecessor, but surpasses that predecessor in almost every way. It’s handy, of course, that Keaton was covered in corpse makeup in the first film, so his Betelgeuse looks the same today as it did in 1988.

Perhaps the nicest surprise is that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is that rare thing, a big-budget comedy that’s actually funny. Alfred Gough and Miles Millar’s ​​screenplay is packed with knockout punchlines, and Burton’s visual gags manage to be hilarious even as they push the boundaries of how eccentric and macabre a Hollywood blockbuster can get. Crucially, instead of relying on CGI, he uses practical effects like puppets, prosthetics, and buckets of slime, which makes the jokes both funnier and more disgusting.

The film’s only flaw is that it has a few too many plot threads, leaving a middle that feels tedious and a rushed, messy ending: like the original Beetlejuice , it could have spent more time with Betelgeuse. Keaton’s snorting troublemaker now has a desk job in the underworld, a nightmarish bureaucracy populated by lost souls with a variety of imaginatively gruesome mutilations. But he’s still pining for Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), the disaffected teenage goth he tried to marry in the first film. Lydia is now a “psychic mediator” who hosts a TV show produced by her delightfully egocentric boyfriend (Justin Theroux). She also has a disaffected teenager of her own, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), who’s embarrassed by what she assumes are her mother’s fraudulent claims to see dead people. And Lydia still can’t get along with her own stepmother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara), a screamingly narcissistic artist who makes O’Hara’s character on Schitt’s Creek seem shy and withdrawn.

Like Top Gun: Maverick , the long gap between the old film and the new one proves to be beneficial. Instead of feeling like a rehash, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice stands as a comedy with its own story and its own concerns. It can be quite moving about the difficulties of growing old, parenthood, and dealing with grief. But then it always reverts to lugubrious, cartoonish nonsense.

The idea is that the various Deetzes are brought together when Lydia’s father is murdered: The actor who played him, Jeffrey Jones, is now a registered sex offender, which probably explains why he wasn’t invited back. When the family gathers at the haunted house where Betelgeuse broke out of the Other Side all those years ago, there’s no sign of the ghosts Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis played in the original film (“How convenient,” Astrid says when Lydia justifies why they’re gone). But Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is still beginning to crack under the weight of its cast of characters. Astrid gets a love interest (Arthur Conti); Betelgeuse is haunted by his vengeful, Morticia Addams-esque ex-wife (Monica Bellucci); and Willem Dafoe plays a vain former actor who works as a detective in the afterlife because that’s what he used to play in the movies. It’s no wonder the writers can’t keep up with everything that’s going on.

As unwieldy as Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is, this gleefully goofy farce is still one of Burton’s most enjoyable films, and a welcome return to his own brand of weirdo creepiness after the Disney misfire that was his 2019 live-action Dumbo remake. He reunites with some old friends in front of and behind the camera, and he throws in a few musical numbers, animated sequences, and Italian film pastiches, so you can tell he had a lot of fun making it. Viewers will have a lot of fun, too.