Thirty-six years after the events of the original Beetlejuice movie, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) is now hosting her own paranormal reality show, Ghost House, when the death of her father calls her, her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega), and her mother, Delia (Catherine O'Hara), back to their family home in Winter River for the funeral.
Meanwhile, in the afterlife, Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) finds himself being stalked by his murderous ex-wife, Delores (Monica Bellucci), and he sees Lydia's return to her old home as his possible escape.
Settling in to Winter River, Astrid - a non-believer in the supernatural - is tricked by a malevolent ghost into swapping her existence for his, and ends up trapped in the afterlife.
Unable to think of any other way to rescue her daughter, Lydia calls on Beetlejuice for assistance.
I'll admit that when I sat down to watch Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, while I had high hopes for a Tim Burton movie with this incredible cast, I wasn't convinced that it would be able to recapture the lightning in a bottle brilliance of 1988's iconic original.
But this sequel turned out to be a pleasant surprise. It's chaotic and madcap, with a whirlwind of plot elements swirling around (not all of which make 100 per cent sense or achieve resolution) and sweeping up a legion of memorable characters.
Michael Keaton has lost none of his gnarly charisma as the demonic Beetlejuice, while the three female leads are perfection personified in their roles: Winona Ryder retains her ultimate goth girl crown, Jenna Ortega sidesteps Wednesday Addams to create a wholly believable sceptic in a family of eccentrics, and Catherine O'Hara is, of course, Catherine O'Hara and we can expect nothing less.
It may be occasionally nonsensical, but Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a hell of a lot of crazy fun, with some great visual gags and a supporting cast as strong as its main cast: from a cameo by Danny DeVito as the afterlife's janitor to Willem Dafoe as Wolf Jackson, the ghost-detective who was actually a B-movie actor in life.
The joyous splattergun approach to the horror-comedy narrative includes the sudden insertion of Beetlejuice's origin story. This caught me totally by surprise, but then again as The Joker of the underworld, was this his true beginning or simply a flight of fancy?
As convincing a yarn as it was, not knowing its veracity certainly adds another layer to the character of the bio-exorcist.
Under Tim Burton's guidance, with a script from Smallville creators and Spider-Man 2 scribes, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice manages, just about, to be simultaneously quite different from the original and very similar.
The Jeffrey Jones of the situation (the disgraced actor played Lydia's dad, Charles, in the first movie) is handled really deftly, through a range of tricks from a claymation death sequence to a headless corpse (and voice impersonator) taking his place in the afterlife.
While, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice mainly stays away from aping moments directly from the original, the climactic musical number - lip-syncing to MacArthur Park - could never reach the enduring heights of the legendary Day-O (The Banana Boat Song) sequence.
That tune does pops up earlier, at Charles funeral, posing a serious challenge to Monty Python's Always Look On The Bright Side of Life as the best tune to play at a funeral.
Given the surreal maelstrom of the denouement, I'm now wondering how long we will have to wait for Tim Burton's Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.