Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

I have to admit that I am only a casual fan of Beetlejuice (I finally watched it for the first time after seeing the musical of the same name last year) but I was still really excited to see the sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, at the Broadway last night.  It is so much fun!  After the death of Charles Deetz, Lydia (Winona Ryder), now the host of a supernatural TV show, her stepmother Delia (Catherine O'Hara), a performance artist, her fiance Rory (Justin Theroux), a narcissistic New Age TV producer, and her estranged daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega), who is still grief-stricken over the death of her father Richard (Santiago Cabrera), return to Winter River for his funeral.  When Astrid becomes trapped in the afterlife, Lydia is forced to call upon Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) to help her rescue her daughter.  In return, Lydia must promise, once again, to marry him so that he can stay in the mortal world.  Betelgeuse is eager to stay in the mortal world because his former wife Dolores (Monica Belucci) is pursuing him in the afterlife seeking vengeance despite the attempts of Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe), a dead actor who once played a B-movie detective, to apprehend her.  Mayhem (including a sandworm) ensues!  While there are a lot of sub-plots to keep track of (my least favorite is Rory trying to marry Lydia for nefarious reasons), I really enjoyed the dynamic between Delia, Lydia, and Astrid because Lydia now finds herself on the receiving end of the same type of disdain from Astrid that she used to show to Delia and the resolution between the three of them is both funny and poignant.  There are also lots of hilarious call backs to the original movie (my favorite is a performance of "Day-O" by a choir at the funeral) along with even zanier characters and more deranged hi-jinks in the afterlife.  Tim Burton returns to form with some truly creepy and ghoulish visuals, including both practical effects and stop-motion animation, and an over-the-top sequence to "MacArthur Park" is worth the price of admission alone!  Keaton, Ryder, and O'Hara (who is an absolute hoot) seem to be having the time of their lives revisiting these characters and Ortega fits right in as a girl who is herself strange and unusual.  I had a blast with this and I highly recommend it, particularly to fans of the original.