I was a casual fan of the 1988 original, having regularly viewed the tamer TV adaptation before that. When I felt like going to a theater again, this sequel was the only feature to grab me. Ordinarily, I'd save its genre for next month, but that slipped my mind.
The decades have not been very kind to Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder). Her husband (Santiago Cabrera) died in an unlikely accident, and despite her success as a televised ghost whisperer, she hasn't been able to contact him. Disbelieving teen daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega, fresh off Wednesday) wants as little to do with her as possible. She still freaks out every time she sees someone wearing black and white horizontal stripes, rightly suspecting that the titular source of her PTSD (Michael Keaton) hasn't given up on coercing her hand in marriage so he can return full-time to the land of the living. In some ways, she has it together even less than her eccentric artist stepmother (Catherine O'Hara), who now reports that Lydia's father also died in an unlikely accident. At his wake, her unorthodox producer (Justin Theroux) aggressively talks her into an imminent Halloween wedding. And when Astrid gets involved with a local boy (Arthur Conti) who's not as harmless as he acts, Lydia fears that her worst nightmare has become her best hope.
Yes, BJ (as he was often called on the show) is not the biggest villain this time around. Perhaps the scariest is his first bride (Monica Bellucci), who suddenly, after six centuries in storage, assembles her butchered corpse to seek him out. Along the way, she's doing what even he can't do, unless he actually has a principle against it: sucking the souls out of ghosts, making them 100% dead. If you thought only sandworms could scare him...
We finally get a bit of BJ's backstory: what kind of living man he was, how he met his wife, and how they died. But we still don't know how he became extraordinarily powerful (if curiously limited) even by ghost standards. Come to think of it, several questions will probably never be answered. For example, why do ghosts never feel like cleaning themselves up, as by pulling the weapons out of their heads?
I can figure out some answers. Although the wake is set at the house from the first movie, we don't hear from the Maitlands again because they couldn't easily fit into this story without dull redundancy. (The publicly stated reason is that Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis can't pass for unaging ghosts even with modern techniques, but that didn't stop Keaton.) Canonically, they found an unspecified way to leave the house to which they'd been confined. We also don't see Jeffrey Jones anymore because of his RL scandal; the narrated death story for Lydia's dad is presented in animation, and his ghost is headless.
I give the filmmakers credit for sticking with old-school effects. Even those that look digital rather than "practical" could have been done in the '80s. It's integral to director Tim Burton's aura.
The sequel is also close to the original in PG-13 edginess. I think it uses more swears, one of which gets bleeped (so it's not just animated movies). The grossness hasn't been toned down a bit, with moments blurring the line between comedy and body horror. I still find it generally amusing, especially with BJ's Mask-like superpowered, irreverent wackiness.
I count BB as one of those long-unawaited sequels that at least preserve the spirit (heh) of the original nicely, if not quite living up to it. If you dug the first, the second should be worth checking out.
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