Legend has it that you can summon Beetlejuice, the prankster, demonic and reportedly insane spirit, by saying his name three times – although the title by Director Tim Burton’s sequel to his career-defining 1988 film does it twice.

But you always have the option to not say his name so many times. Or not at all. You can even start with “Beetlejuice” and change it halfway through to, say, “-mania.”

In other words, you can easily spare yourself this long-awaited film, an extended but very uneven rehash that recycles many of the best elements from the first film. Beetle juice, including a variation on the great playback number “Day-O.” (Here the number is the sublimely incongruous “MacArthur Park,” complete with its famous pie, gray as a tombstone, melting in the rain falling from a tiny cloud.)

But the surprise and fun are gone. Beetle juice 1 had an exciting, surreal strangeness, thanks to the originality of Burton’s perverse Gothic humor and the unsettling performance of a manic, growling Michael Keaton, looking like a dead possum in prison stripes.

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Keaton is still funny, manic and growling, but not disturbing — nothing to burden your subconscious with in your dreams or your waking hours. You can almost take his grotesque vaudevillian enthusiasm for granted. It’s like Pennywise from It spent too many nights perfecting his stand-up comedy routine for a Netflix special.

The film’s plot is a needlessly rambling affair, some of it inspired, some of it 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 upper body missing and blood gurgling around his exposed intestines when he tries to speak. (He was bitten in half by a shark.)

Below that, you’ll also find a corpse that’s been dismembered and stored in boxes. This would have been great product placement for the Container Store. She’s using a stapler to put herself back together, limb by limb. The result is a beautiful, deadly-as-nightshade ghost named Dolores, who just so happens to be Beetlejuice’s ex-wife.

She’s played by Monica Bellucci with enough slippery glamour that you wish she’d gotten more screen time. Mostly, she inhales the life from her victims, causing them to collapse into a rubbery heap, like an inflatable mattress with a hole in it. It’s little more than a good party trick.

Then there’s Willem Dafoe as former actor Wolf Jackson, now dead and with a large chunk of his skull exposed, who serves as the ghouls’ force for law and order, barking orders and chewing his words like sandwich meat.

Meanwhile, it seems Beetlejuice has earned his own C-suite in the afterlife, assisted by an entourage of suited, square-shouldered, shrunken-headed men (including Bob from Beetle juice 1)Of course, he will soon be called back to the realm of the living, where (as always) he looks more alive than anyone else.

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

Beetlejuice 2 doesn’t build on the first film or advance Burton as a director. One of the most original filmmakers of his generation, he gave us at least three classics — Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns And Sweeney Todd — and impressive peculiarities such as Ed Woods, Sleepy Hollow And Big eyes.

But the success of his sensibility may also have made it less distinctive in the long run, or at least less surprising in its frequent brushes with death-stricken beauty. He could be the Edgar Allan Poe of American cinema.

The most magical, Burtonesque image here is of those shrunken minions, dressed in marigold suits and running around at night like Frankensteins hurtling down a catwalk. They’re both menacing and mesmerizing, almost enough to make you chant “Beetlejuice!” three times. Maybe more.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is in theaters from September 6.