By Kirk Boxleitner

Tim Burton already defied gravity with the almost impossible alchemical mix of 1988’s “Beetlejuice,” so the fact that his sequel “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” released 36 years later, works even half as well as it does? That qualifies as capturing lightning in a bottle twice.

The original “Beetlejuice” is a bizarre tonal mix. It’s a horror-comedy about a wildly dysfunctional family moving into a haunted house, that draws laughs from the pretentiousness of a depressed teen’s suicide note, before forcing her to agree to a shotgun wedding with a perverted demon.

And its happy ending gives our girl ghost parents to fill in for her flaky, negligent living family.

So for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” to succeed, it has to make us fondly nostalgic for characters who lose their distinctly entertaining identities if they’re sentimentalized too much.

Since milquetoast ornithophile Charles Deetz was played by Jeffrey Jones, who turned out to be a scumbag in the Kevin Spacey vein in real life, this sequel kills him off, resorting to inventive animation and special effects techniques to avoid using more than photographs of the actor (unlike the Star Wars franchise, there are no CGI recreations of his realistic likeness).

This leaves his daughter, the now-adult Lydia Deetz — Winona Ryder, returning to the role that launched millions of Generation X crushes on goth girls — with her high-strung artiste stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara, as delightfully unhinged as ever), plus two new members of the family since the first film.

In the most flawlessly fitting casting since she starred as Wednesday Addams in Netflix’s “Wednesday,” Jenna Ortega out-dours the literally haunted Lydia as her snappy daughter Astrid, while Justin Theroux is almost too effective as Lydia’s objectionably unctuous boyfriend Rory, who produces the reality TV show in which she plays a psychic medium.

One of the great gags in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is that its title character — to whom I’ll refer by his correctly spelled name of “Betelgeuse,” to distinguish him from the films themselves — is neither the most significant threat nor even the worst person in this sequel.

As much as Burton condemned the closed-minded cliquishness of conformist suburbanites in “Edward Scissorhands,” the humor of the original “Beetlejuice” was hugely fueled by satirizing the sort of self-consciously quirky urbane creative types who have come to comprise a sizable share of his own fanbase.

As irreplaceable as Glenn Shadix (RIP) was as the catastrophically tasteless interior designer Otho Fenlock in the first film, Theroux’s Rory plays perfectly into the sequel’s warnings against ostensibly sensitive men whose performative “non-toxic masculinity” is not only toxic in its own right, but ultimately predatory.

I couldn’t have asked for a better actress than Monica Bellucci to play the sinister, initially enigmatic femme fatale who would serve as a window into Betelgeuse’s past, rendered through a hilariously staged and fascinating flashback sequence, but I found myself slightly disappointed that her character was left with so little to do.

By contrast, Willem Dafoe is effortlessly effective as the vainglorious afterlife detective Wolf Jackson, whose roots as a B-movie action star in life lend an amusing irony to his catchphrase of “Keep it real,” as he reads his instructions to his ghost cops off oversized cue cards.

Amidst all the insanity, I found myself surprisingly moved by the grudging mutual respect that Lydia and Delia have gained for each other as adults, which is underscored, rather than diminished, by the fact that Delia remains every bit the flake that Dick Cavett verbally burned so savagely in the first film.

But none of this would matter if Michael Keaton didn’t step back into the role of the deliberately disgusting Betelgeuse as smoothly as though he’d never left.

Keaton first played Betelgeuse before he and Burton teamed up again to make two Batman films, in 1989 and 1992. “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” even features a cameo by one of Keaton’s “Batman Returns” costars — but like Ian McDiarmid as Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars films, playing a decrepit character when he was a relatively young man simply means he’s even more suited to the role as he’s advanced in age.

Fans of the possession scene set to Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat (Day-O)” in the original “Beetlejuice” should appreciate how “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” employs “MacArthur Park,” right down to its literal depiction of the song’s ridiculous lyrics.

Bonus points to frequent genre player Burn Gorman, here playing an obsequious small-town priest, for managing to make his lip-syncing appear spiritually puppeteered.

Amazingly enough, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” picks up the threads of a nearly 40-year-old one-off film so well that I’d actually be down for a third installment in the series, and not just because the naming convention established by this sequel practically demands that we should eventually get “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”