Fun and enjoyable comedy sequel.

This was a family trip to the cinema, with each of us having differing levels of familiarity with the original. (The youngest strangely had the best knowledge of it having watched it a couple of weeks ago.) However, we found it wasn’t really necessary to have a strong connection to the first film to enjoy this.

Director Tim Burton has been on a pretty bad run but this was good; a chaotic, silly and fun horror comedy.

It takes a bit of time to warm up, but once it picks up momentum it is very good.

It is overstuffed, and it feels a bit like it is throwing in the kitchen sink in terms of plot. It is probably a bit too much going on story wise, with several plot strands going on at the same time, but it does a good job of juggling them and the final act successfully brings them all together nicely, even though you could have easily lost one or two without it affecting the movie.

It has an absurd but amusing conclusion but it is so ridiculous that I couldn’t help but be very entertained by it. 

It does well in dealing with the “cancelling” of one of the original cast members, and uses it to the movie’s advantage.

There are several nice moments of drama interspersed with the humour, particularly to do with the relationship between Lydia Deetz and her daughter Astrid. They are played very well, respectively, by Winona Ryder and Jenna Ortega, whose performances nicely counter balance the mayhem going on around them. Michael Keaton, of course, steals the show, although Willem Dafoe is also in fine comedic form.

It has too much going on at times and sometimes it is a little too silly for its own good but we all had a blast watching it, and the kids thought it was the best movie they had seen for some time, so who am I to argue?