Michael Keaton’s eponymous trickster demon took hold of our pop-culture hearts 36 years ago, propelling director Tim Burton’s utterly gonzo fantasy onto the big screen in a genre-busting horror-comedy unlike anything anyone had seen before. (The 1988 classic also introduced a generation of kids to the quaint beauty of scary movies.) The sequel, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” (★★½ out of four; rated PG-13; in theaters Friday) has a big heart and fleeting moments of inspired fun, often featuring Keaton’s moldy visage as the menace. Compared to the brilliant original, though, the overstuffed sequel lacks the same unhinged, madcap magic.

Though uneven, the film finds Burton back in the business of creating spooky spectacles, while creating interesting echoes between the two films: Harry Belafonte singing “Day-O,” for example, is the signature riff from the first “Beetlejuice,” while pop epic “MacArthur Park” plays to a similar tune here. And while Winona Ryder, as Lydia Deetz, was Miss Goth Teen 1988, Jenna Ortega is perfectly cast decades later as daughter Astrid, her rebellious heir to the throne.

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“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is largely about the estrangement between mother and daughter. Lydia, whom Beetlejuice tried to marry back in the day, is still plagued by occasional visions of the weirdo now that she’s a TV celebrity. But she’s not in the best of emotional states, and neither is Astrid, an environmentally conscious boarding school student who rejects her mother’s psychic powers. Especially since, despite all the ghosts and specters Lydia can see, the one she can’t see is the ghost of Astrid’s dead father.