Arise, ye undead fans! It's time to witness the Deetz and The Beets joining forces again, proving that when the afterlife hands you lemons, you juice them twice into something resembling chaos and dark humour. Welcome to Beetlejuice squared, where everything is twice as strange, twice as hammy, and twice as...well, necessary.

Enter Jenna Ortega, who effortlessly picks up where Winona Ryder's Miss Teen Strange & Unusual 1988 left off. Still riding her star-making turn as everybody's favourite day of the week, Ortega slides into this role like a goth kid slipping into their favourite black everything. She's not just Queen of the Strange and Unusual now - she's angry, ruling with a side-eye and a scepticism that could shatter glass. If Ryder was winking at you, Ortega would be outright furious in a way that teenagers specialise in.

The movie opens with that delightfully retro font from the original titles like the '80s never left. Cue the music - yes, that music - and let's fly over the model town, updated with some updated effects and modern anxieties. Everything's still charmingly low-fi, with a magic sprinkle of CGI to remind us it's the 21st century. There's something deliciously tactile about the practical effects, set design, and costuming as if Tim Burton raided the attic of his childhood nightmares and found new toys to play with.

Ortega's all no-nonsense, all science, and absolutely not here for the ghosts. She ramps up her emotions, perhaps in an attempt to distance herself from Wednesday. Think the Addams family role with extra angst and a refusal to indulge in the family fondness of communing with the undead. Her "no ghost crap" stance is adamant. It provides the best part of the plot, which is saying something when your co-stars include Winona Ryder overacting just the right amount and Monica Bellucci. Sadly, Bellucci, while entering like the femme fatale of our dreams, promptly gets wasted in a soul-sucking subplot that deserves way more screen time and a satisfying resolution.

Speaking of wastes of talent, there's Willem Dafoe. I mean, I get it - he's creepy. He's funny. But you could cut his character entirely and not even notice. Meanwhile, as Lidia's overly twitchy and anxious mother, O'Hara as Delia, is living her best kooky, performance-artist life, gamely overacting in cringy and adorable ways. Everyone's going total ham, except for Ortega, who is busy with her love interest (cue Mazzy Star, obviously) ground things just enough to keep us from floating off into complete absurdity.

Keaton is back as everybody's favourite scruffy demon on the search for a bride (being alive optional). He's had some of the slightly more dated actual creepiness sanded off him, and that's a good thing. He's also in what's possibly the second best sequence which will raise the eyebrows of Ingmar Bergman fans.

And now, the bad news: there's not enough Bellucci. Did I mention that already? Because it bears repeating. Monica Bellucci, as a soul-hoovering villain, should be a highlight. Yet it falls apart and feels like we got half a Bellucci when we deserved the full Italian buffet.

On the plus side, the needle drops are fun and well-placed. Don Cornelius would be ecstatic. It's like he rose from the dead just to bless the dance sequences - an expensive dad joke wrapped in supernatural dancing absurdity. It's so gloriously weird that even the dead are tapping their feet. There's a poke at phone-wielding influencers that is both amusing and slightly out of touch like your trying-to-be-cool uncle experimenting with TikTok for the first time.

And yes, the title not so subtly hints at a trilogy setup. Whether we get another one ... well, that's up to the whims of the box office and how much juice is left to squeeze from this undead fruit. But for now, we can revel that The Beets and the Deetz are back and dressed in black. Ortega's applying her raccoon eyeliner, and the whole thing is gloriously, beautifully, over-the-top weird.