Michael Keaton returns in an entertaining but bumpy sequel

According to legend, Beetlejuice, the choking, demonic and probably insane spirit, is summoned by saying his name three times – although the title from Director Tim Burton’s sequel to his career-defining 1988 film has to make do with two parts.

But you always have the option not to say his name so often. Or at all. You can even start with “Beetlejuice” and switch to “-Mania.”

In other words, you can easily skip this highly anticipated film, a lavish but very uneven remake that recycles many of the best elements of the first installment. Beetle juice, including a variation on the great backing track “Day-O.” (Here the song is the sublimely illogical “MacArthur Park,” complete with its famous cake, gray as a tombstone melting in the rain falling from a tiny cloud.)

But the surprise and joy have faded. Beetlejuice 1 had a thrilling, surreal strangeness, thanks to the originality of Burton’s twisted gothic humor and the disturbing portrayal of a manic, snarling Michael Keaton made up to look like a dead opossum in prison garb.

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Keaton is still funny, manic and snarling, but not disturbing – nothing that tugs at your subconscious in your dreams or in your waking hours. You can almost take his grotesque vaudeville enthusiasm for granted. It’s as if Pennywise had come out of It had spent too many nights perfecting his stand-up routine for a Netflix special.

The film’s plot is an unnecessarily loose web of facts, some of which are inspired, some of which are less so.

On Earth, Lydia Deetz (Winona Rider) has become the host of a reality show called ghost town, while her mother (Catherine O’Hara) mourns the loss of her husband. His remains now wander the underworld, his torso missing and blood gurgling in his exposed intestines whenever he tries to speak. (He was bitten in half by a shark).

Also below is a corpse chopped into pieces and stored in boxes—this would have been a great spot for product placement in the Container Store—that is being put back together limb by limb with a stapler: the result is a beautiful ghost, deadly as the nightshade family, named Dolores, who happens to be Beetlejuice’s ex-wife.

She’s played by Monica Bellucci with so much slick glamour that you wish she’d been given more screen time. Most of the time she sucks the life out of her victims and makes them collapse into a rubbery heap, like an inflatable mattress with a hole in it. It’s not much more than a good party trick.

Then there’s Willem Dafoe as former actor Wolf Jackson, now dead and with much of his skull exposed, who serves as the ghouls’ law enforcer, barking orders and biting down on his words as if they were sandwich meat.

Meanwhile, Beetlejuice seems to have earned his own executive suite in the afterlife, manned by an entourage of men in suits, broad-shouldered men with shrunken heads (including Bob from Beetle juice 1). Of course, he will soon be called back to the realm of the living, where he will (as always) seem more alive than everyone else.

None of this would have been out of place in Beetlejuice 1, and maybe that’s the problem.

Beetlejuice 2 does not build on the first film and does not advance Burton as a director. As one of the most original filmmakers of his generation, he has given us at least three classics – Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns And Sweeney Todd — and impressive curiosities such as Ed Woods, Sleepy Hollow And Big eyes.

But the success of his sensibility may have made it less distinctive in the long run, or at least less startling in its frequent bouts of doomed beauty. He could be the Edgar Allan Poe of American cinema.

The most magical, Burton-esque image here is the shrunken-headed Minions dressed in marigold-colored suits, running around at night like Frankensteins rampaging down a catwalk. They’re both menacing and adorable, almost enough to make you shout “Beetlejuice!” three times. Maybe more.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice will be in cinemas on September 6th.