Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

The inner child is alive, moderately well and kicking in Tim Burton’s febrile imagination but the “juice” is beginning to wear a bit thin.

Fans of the 1988 original will not be deterred - way back then it was a camp and fun surprise orchestrated with a sense of the macabre and self-mockery by Burton, who clearly was going places and certainly did not disappoint.

Now it appears he is raking over the coals 36 years on and trying to recapture the ghoulish magic. To a degree he succeeds especially with Monica Bellucci’s Delores as a ghost who has been hacked to pieces and is lying dormant in boxes. The sight of her stapling her pieces together including a face that has been cut in half, is a sight to behold. Made whole again she proceeds to suck the souls from the dead.

Burton pieces together the components with a demonic rigour that belies its sequel status. There’s Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz who was a goth teen and now has a daughter (Jenna Ortega) and hosts a paranormal TV show for which her offspring has nothing but contempt.

Also back in the fray is Catherine O’Hara as Delia, Lydia’s self-obsessed stepmother. And, of course, there’s eye-popping Michael Keaton still firing on all cylinders after all these years and trying to entice Lydia into marrying him.

There’s plenty of blood and guts and spewing entrails and the birth of a hideous baby to keep the momentum at fever pitch as it zips along, referencing more serious concerns with death and the after-life en route. Well worth waiting for is the climactic wedding scene set, bizarrely, to Richard Harris’s rendition of MacArthur Park, which shouldn’t work but does.

One of the joys of the current film is how little Burton relies on technology to create his effects, preferring instead to use old-fashioned craftsmanship and puppetry. What doesn’t make an impression is the succession of knowing one-liners, many of which land with a thud.

There is more than enough here, however, to keep his legion of admirers in whatever passes for Seventh Heaven in Burton’s universe but those coming to it cold may be more than a little underwhelmed.