It’s so good to have the old gang back that it seems childish to complain about any aspect of this long-awaited Beetlejuice Beetlejuice reunion. Seventy-three-year-old Michael Keaton is still terrific as the ferocious undead “freelance bioexorcist,” and if he seems a touch slower and less electrically frenetic than in the delightful first Beetle juice from thirty-five years ago, well, none of us are getting any younger.

Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz, still sporting the Goth widow weeds and spiky bangs of her depressed teenage years, remains eerily lovable in her confused middle age. Only now she’s an actual widow haunted by her own estranged daughter, Astrid (the perfectly cast Jenna Ortega of Wednesday), and a career as a minor TV celebrity with a ghost hunting show called Haunted House and a pushy TV producer friend named Rory (Justin Theroux).

Lydia’s mother Delia Deetz (played by the divine Catherine O’Hara) is as crazy and self-centered as the ultra-successful conceptual artist she is now (“I am my art”) as she was when she was struggling to get noticed by the art world in 1988. Remember in Beetle juice as she railed against her mild-mannered, recently retired real estate developer husband, Charles (Jeffrey Jones), about their new home in “the sticks” of Winter River, Connecticut, her voice gradually rising to a chilling scream: “I’ll live with you in this hell, but I need to express myself. If you don’t let me gut this house and make it my own, I’ll go crazy and TAKE YOU WITH ME!”

Charles is gone (probably due to Jeffrey Jones’s final cancellation), and his funeral is the event that reunites the three matrilineal generations of the surviving Deetz family. A hilarious Claymation sequence illustrates the account of Charles’s comically grotesque death. An a capella children’s choir sings the calypso song “Day-O,” so central to the charms of Beetle juice ’88, at his grave.

These refreshingly inspired pieces show us that director Tim Burton is back, too, after a long, dreary slog through increasingly bad films that have done so much to ruin his reputation as a filmmaker. In interviews, Burton has indicated that he can identify with one of the film’s central themes: “Sometimes, as an adult, you get a little lost,” he said in an interview, “and you have to reconnect with yourself. So it became very personal and emotional for me.”

Burton was really losing his way creatively, but with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice He shows that you can go home again, by embracing the sweetly satirical approach that was once so evident in his films. In the 1980s of the Ronald Reagan era, it was hard to beat American culture into awfulness. Burton’s loving embrace of occult weirdness offered a life-giving alternative. Ghosts and vampires, witches and demons, the undead of all kinds, and a love of pop culture darkness offered enlightenment for all of us isolated weirdos in a brutally conformist culture.

His films embraced the tendencies of old-fashioned TV entertainment, incorporating horror elements into friendly, suburban and small-town TV comedies, such as The Addams Family, EnchantedAnd The MunstersThey all presented, in a rather unsubtle way, little allegories of tolerance for racial, gender and sexual differences, which were heartwarming in the 1950s and 1960s, the era of the civil rights movement and the backlash against it.

Burton’s films emphasized a steadfast love of the communal quality of the ‘handmade’. His 1994 masterpiece Ed Hout was a celebration of outsiders in America bringing together a film community based on the faded Dracula stardom of Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau), overflowing with tenderness for their necessarily domestic, rock-bottom low-budget films. This handmade aspect of Beetle juice was considered a requirement for any sequel, Michael Keaton emphasized, the second line right after the one about the character Betelgeuse having screen time severely limited:

I said, “Tim, if I ever do this again, I can’t be any more involved than I was in the first one. That would be a really big mistake.” He said, “I know that.” I said, “And number two, it’s got to feel handmade like the first one — less, less, less, if there’s any technology.” And he was way ahead of me on that. You almost want to see a little bit of plywood. You know what I mean?

In Beetle juice ’88, crew members stuck their hands into the giant shrimp in bowls on the dining room table during the beloved “Day-O” demon possession number, so they could grab the faces of Charles, Delia and their guests after the final “daylight come and me wanna go home!” In Beetlejuice BeetlejuiceThe song of the possessed is “MacArthur Park.” The number features a wedding party of free-interpretive dancers as Betelgeuse and Lydia waltz to the ceiling, clearly hoisted there by old-fashioned harnesses and wires.

There’s a bit too much plot in it Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Detours, including Astrid’s mysterious new boyfriend Jeremy (Arthur Conti) and Betelgeuse’s vengeful ex-wife Delores (the always stunning Monica Bellucci) are likely responsible for the sometimes slower pace of the place compared to the breezy Beetle juice ’88. But even the additional characters and plot developments pay dividends, like the wonderful bit about Betelgeuse’s past in plague-ridden medieval Spain, when he married Delores, which occasionally causes him to lapse into Spanish. And there are funny bits with Danny DeVito and Willem Dafoe, who seem right at home in the Beetle juice world.

For those who don’t quite understand why this great late return to the world of Beetle juice is a big deal, There’s almost no point in trying to explain it. You either get it right away, even if you can’t put it into words, or you don’t get it at all. But I encourage you to try to get it, because it’s a refreshingly comic vision that Tim Burton insists he won’t evoke again in this lifetime.

At the current pace, with the current rate of advancement in medical science, Tim Burton will not Beetle juice Beetle juice Beetle juice until after he’s dead. Of course, if the Beetle juice Movies teach us one thing: there are many joyful ways for the dead to continue to wreak havoc in the land of the living.