The pure nonsense silly-spooky practical visual imagination and B-movie cartoon grotesquerie of the original film is just the perfect mode for Burton, and being forced to revive all the charmingly kitschy production methods in which he used to realize these images for consistencies sake has resulted in the most fun he (and one of his ensembles) has had in decades. Not without its fair share of janky overstuffed modern legacy sequel-isms to be sure, but as soon as I saw the credit for "animatronic & special makeup effects" over a shot of miniatures and Danny Elfman music I knew everything was going to be okay. Doesn't really spend long enough on any one of its subplots for any to stand out or fall flat which would be a bigger issue if everything around them was less colorful, musical, surreal, gag-heavy, etc. Murderous fetus Beetlejuice puppet exactly the kind of lowbrow bullshit I wanted out of this thing. “My water broke during Kill Baby Kill.” Would be amusing to have been a fly on the wall during the studio exec conversations that led to there being way more Jeffrey Jones references than Alec Baldwin ones.

Full discussion on my podcast SLEAZOIDS.