The Venice Film Festival, the industry’s oldest event, likes to capitalize on its past, with vintage stills in the foyer and retrospectives of old films in the smaller theaters. Away from the main program, it’s a veritable ghost town, a seething afterlife of film history. Occasionally, its ghosts storm the red carpet, too. Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the opening film of the 81st edition, is a playful attempt to revive the framework of the director’s beloved 1988 horror-comedy, even if the shock tactics this time around seem a little worn, like something off the rack from a small-town thrift store. The hyperventilating plot doesn’t help matters. Burton spins his tale of the living and the dead, incorporating sandworms, show tunes and a Soul Train into the afterlife. Perhaps he is arguing that if a flashy scene doesn’t grab our attention, we don’t need to be afraid: 30 seconds later, the next, equally flashy scene will come along.

Winona Ryder reprises her role as Lydia Deetz, the plucky gothic heroine from the original film. Lydia is now a middle-aged psychic, cashing in on the success of a cheesy TV show, but has a fiancé named Rory (Justin Theroux), whose man bun and New Age babble immediately give away that he’s the wrong guy. When Lydia revisits her hometown of Winter River for Halloween, she is teased by memories of the ancient trickster demon (Michael Keaton) and desperately tries to protect her family. “If you say his name three times, he’ll appear,” she warns. Rory, the jerk, immediately obliges. He’s doing this, he says, because he’s doing trauma therapy.

Keaton himself is one of the more superfluous acts in this retro circus, introducing the film’s handmade effects and punctuating the plot twists with violence. He runs terrified from his soul-stealing ex-wife (Monica Bellucci) and is pursued through the afterlife by Willem Dafoe’s hard-boiled ghost detective. But he remains a mothballed, monotonous presence, a series of wisecracks searching for meaning. Perhaps that’s the consequence of patrolling the spirit world for more than 600 years. After a while, any job inevitably loses its appeal.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice returns to the scene of past triumphs. Once, Twice, Thrice, it’s a lazy, amiable horror-movie sequel; a makeshift festival opener with little to offer beyond its arrangement of kitschy American Gothic. The fresh pop comes from a snappy subplot involving Lydia’s rebellious daughter Astrid, played with just the right note of soulful sullenness by Jenna Ortega. While rumbling through Winter River, Astrid meets a sensitive local ghost named Jeremy, who still haunts the tree he fell out of as a teenager. Astrid longs to reconnect with her beloved dead father; Jeremy, in turn, believes he can help. And in these scenes, in the underground ticket booth next to the Soul Train, you get a glimpse of the vibrant, vital film this could have been.

Burton’s 1988 original was the director’s big break, indirectly paving the way for Batman, Ed Wood, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Since then, Beetlejuice has been repurposed as a TV cartoon, a video game, and a flopped Broadway musical, arguably making it something of a franchise. But this long-awaited sequel doesn’t add much to the mythos, nor does it push the story in a radically new direction. For all its gushing entrails and giddy demon babies, Beetlejuice feels underpowered and inconsequential. It’s a likable exercise in nostalgia; a joyride through old haunts. Burton’s underworld story has plenty of secondhand spirit; what it needs is fresh blood. What it needs is some substance.