In 1988, “Beetlejuice” was a comedy, a ghost story, a high-camp horror flick, and a macabre funhouse ride, all fueled by a new breed of palm-buzzer freak-show goofiness. I first saw it during a sneak preview on Saturday night, before anyone else knew anything about it, and by the time it was over, it was clear that its director, Tim Burton, was going to be a superstar, presiding over his own strangely fiery world of creepy satire.

Burton, 26, had already directed “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” but “Beetlejuice,” though in some ways a rambling cartoon, had a force at work. You could say that “Beetlejuice” was a mood. The vision of the afterlife as a waiting room of waxwork horrors; the moment when those shrimp leapt off the plate in the spectacular musical demonic possession sequence “Day-O”; and Michael Keaton’s wild, gibbering, Groucho-Marx-meets-dripping-forlorn performance as Beetlejuice, the sleazy bio-exorcist — the film channeled a spirit that was not just mad, but hilariously deranged.

It’s the nature of the brand Tim Burton has become that when you watch “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” his let’s-watch-that-again-36-years-later-because-why-not sequel that opened the Venice Film Festival today, you can almost see him at work, fitting the pieces together, trying to recapture the old Burton-cracked-Gothic lightning in a bottle. One of those pieces is Monica Bellucci’s image as Delores, a dismembered ghost who lies asleep in various boxes, literally pulling her body parts together and apart (torso, legs and arms severed, face sliced ​​in half), all to the tune of the Bee Gees’ “Tragedy,” which sort of half-makes sense — I guess there’s something tragic about her? — but mostly just works as an ideal deranged needle drop. She then wanders around sucking up the souls of the dead, which they Real dead. (Did I mention she’s Beetlejuice’s ex-wife? It’s complicated.)

“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” starts off awkwardly, with Burton setting up his characters as if they were part of a “Beetlejuice” board game. As it progresses, though, the pieces start to come together in the same way that Delores’s face and body do. The film is only a light riff on “Beetlejuice” — a bit of fan service, really. It doesn’t deliver the full monster-kitsch jolt that the original film did. Still, there’s good fan service and bad, and as contrived and gimmicky as it can be at times, I had a pretty good time with “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” Burton’s once-skewed way of looking at the world was long ago ingrained in ours (which is one reason he’s sometimes struggled to inject that same buzz into his films). But if “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is mostly a joke, like the current Broadway hit version of “Beetlejuice,” then part of what the new film offers is a genuine nostalgia for a time when Burton’s clown spirit from hell still had shock value.

It is therefore one of those sequels that a lot looking back in time. The film opens with the tingling of Danny Elfman’s unnerving ghostly music, accompanied by another flyover shot of the picturesque town of Winter River, Connecticut, where Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz, the former goth teen who had contact with the spirit world, is now a paranormal mediator who hosts her own paranormal-hunting television show called “Ghost House.” Lydia still wears her hair in spiky bangs, but where you might expect her to have relaxed into middle age, Ryder finds her more distraught than ever. Maybe that’s because her TV producer boyfriend, Rory (Justin Theroux), is a foppish scoundrel who speaks in progressive therapeutic clichés to disguise his blatant opportunism. Or maybe it’s because her daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), has nothing but contempt for her mother’s ghostly preoccupations, which she believes to be pure delusion.

Catherine O’Hara, overwrought as ever, is back as Delia, Lydia’s narcissistic stepmother. And to sidestep the awkwardness over former cast member Jeffrey Jones (now a convicted sex offender), his character Charles—Lydia’s father and Delia’s husband—is given a claymation segment that ends with him getting bitten by a shark; the character then spends the rest of the film prowling the afterlife as a headless, blood-spurting slob. As for Keaton’s titular pest, he keeps popping up in Lydia’s line of sight, and it’s not long before he’s called upon. Keaton, at 73, invests him with the same obscenely creaky energy and disposable cunning—and in fact, Beetlejuice comes up with another way to force Lydia to marry him. It all has to do with the fact that Astrid has fallen in love with a handsome guy from her class (Arthur Conti), who turns out to have a very dark secret.

The film really comes to life in the scene where Beetlejuice takes on the roles of Lydia and Rory.
“Couple’s Therapist” literally speaks his heart out, and then produces a baby version of himself — one every bit as disturbing as the ceiling-crawling one in “Trainspotting.” Such a move exists largely for its own pleasantly sick good, and that, in its own way, is the “Beetlejuice” aesthetic: Tim Burton makes this stuff up simply because it tickles his mischievous imagination. At least one thing he’s come up with is a little cringe: the pun on “Soul Train,” complete with a boogie-down chorus of ‘70s funk dancers (which in the film becomes a train for dead souls — get it?). And the plot has more of the balsa-wood quality of the Alec Baldwin/Geena Davis ghost plot in “Beetlejuice.”

After a while, though, the conceits begin to gather steam and clink together, whether it’s Bob, the shrunken, bulging-eyed head in a full suit, presiding over an army of Bobs in the office; or Willem Dafoe delving into the soppiness of Wolf Jackson, a former B-movie actor, now with the left side of his brain exposed (the result of a grenade accident), who heads the police force of the afterlife but acts like he’s still in a bad movie; or the film’s cheeky homages to the black-and-white era of Mario Bava and the dreamy dread of “Carrie”; or the mesmerizing gem Burton creates, in the climactic wedding sequence, using Richard Harris’ rendition of “MacArthur Park” for a sequence of blissful lip-sync frenzy. “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” isn’t “Beetlejuice,” but it ultimately has just enough Burton juice.