Addams Family Values (1993)

The movie opens up with the vast dark sky lit only by a ghastly pale full moon and the howling of a "wolf", but quickly the audience is completely taken out of the dreary mood by discovering that the "wolf" that was howling is actually a short, bald-headed man, screeching on top of a roof. Addams Family Values is the perfect blend of family and dark humor. The film is drenched with verbal and situational irony—as great comedies should be —to heighten the extremities of the Addams family's preferences and tastes. Needless to say, the world is a little to bright and sunny for them. After watching the movie, it will seem a little too bright and sunny to you as well! One of the opening lines of the movie is Morticia Addams (the mother) saying calmly to her husband, "Gomez, I'm going to have a baby, right…now." The movie then jumps into a sequence of rapid montage shots: Morticia being rushed into the hospital with a smirk on her face, Motricia and Gomez talking about how much Morticia is enjoying the pain she is experiencing, and cutting to Wednesday and Pugsley Addams in the waiting room. While a bubbly and excited girl sits across from them in the waiting room, she excitedly explains to them where babies come from. Her story consists of unicorns, fairies, and magic. After listening with a melancholy face, Wednesday responds to the little girl, "our parents had sex." The movie is rated PG-13 for "language, smoking, sensuality and some bloody comic violence." If this movie isn't on your go-to Halloween family movies list, you are missing out on a belly full of laughs!

I'm a big fan of Barry Sonnenfeld's Addams Family films. They're a little light on story, and this one has the same loose method of tying up this story as the first one did. But the macabre humour is spot on yet again here. Huge credit to Sonnenfeld for keeping the film PG yet still giving it a slightly twisted, dark feel.I think they'd struggle to find better actors for these characters. The whole cast is fairly well on point, with Christopher Lloyd and Christina Ricci the stand outs. This is interesting given how brazenly different they are. Lloyd really goes into the role, and shifts his face in all kinds of weird directions to bolster his portrayal of the awkward humpback, Fester. Ricci keeps her face straight the whole time, adopting Wednesday's morbid cynicism and delivering each line in near monotone, yet timing the delivery so well that it brings a laugh almost the whole way through.It lacks focus and there probably didn't need to be two main story lines when the plot writing is the weaker element in the film. But it's funny enough and directed with enough macabre flair to make this, as well as its predecessor, a very entertaining film. Also worth noting that at 90 minutes, it breezes along beautifully.7/10

The one gripe (if you can even call it that) I have with "Addams Family Values" is the end credits song. Tag Team doesn't work anywhere near as well as MC Hammer did. But everything else here works wonderfully.More than the first, this is the epitome of a real-life cartoon, not to mention a refined one-liner assembly line. And the perfect casting extends to the supporting players (Joan Cusack and deranged Christine Baranski). But, for me, Christina Ricci owns this movie (this from a pretty big Raúl Juliá fan) with little more than facial expressions, from annoyance and disgust to unbalanced perkiness. Ricci's working with a much more experienced group of players, which really emphasizes her talent here. She's mastered this character. Her sabotaging the Summer camp pageant is the best part of the whole thing, and I'll be damned if she's not my favorite Pocahontas.This movie's a winner, on par with (if not better than) the original. With a cast like this, it's hard to see it turning out poorly, but refreshing that it's anything but.8/10

Now that the Addams family have gotten the whole is Fester really Fester issue out of the way, they can go on with their lives, and now that there's a baby, they've got another issue: the other children want the baby dead! Gomez and Morticia decide to get a nanny (a child sitter, not a goat, to paraphrase Ricky Ricardo), and like the Von Trapp children (but in a more demonic way), Pugsly and (especially) Wednesday come up with clever ways of getting rid of each one, more foolish than the one before. When one European lady comes in with a puppet, it's not surprising that Wednesday has a puppet of her own, and it ain't close to Lambchops. Then in walks Joan Cusack, the cheery, blonde beauty with a perfect response to every question, yet all too perfect to be trusted. The film switches cleverly into two subplots as Cusack has Pugsly and Wednesday sent off to summer camp while she plots a way to win Uncle Fester's heart so she can cook his hide to get her grubby little paws on his fortune and Pugsly and Wednesday deal with the freaky "normal" people they encounter at camp as only an Addams can."I'm not perky", Ricci says as Wednesday, after sitting through Disney movies and every family musical ever made, smiling evilly which sends one obnoxious little blonde girl into hysterics. Of course, she earlier got the better of them too when she adds her own twist to a ghost story that is every little rich girl's fear, already having failed to jump into the water to save the "little miss perfect" from drowning during a life-saving course. Peter MacNichol and Christine Baranski are delightfully obnoxious as the cheerful but snooty moderators of the summer camp, treating each blue eyed/blonde haired boy and girl as if they were the second coming of Christ and any one else as freaks of nature. It's up to Pugsly, Wednesday and their nerdy friend (David Krumholtz) to turn the tables on this group of freaky up-scales so they can rush back and save Fester from a fate worse than life.The Addams kids rule in this sequel with Gomez and Morticia slightly more in the background in spite of a hot dance sequence in a restaurant that looks like a cave. Joan Cusack is a delightful villain, with Lloyd hysterical as Uncle Fester trying to impress her with his walrus impression. (I hope she hadn't planned on eating those bread-sticks...) Carol Kane takes over the role of Grandma Addams, getting in a few witty lines here and there, highly reminding me of Jackie Hoffman's portrayal of Grandma in the Broadway musical version. Speaking of that, there's a delightful surprise cameo by none other than the future Gomez of Broadway himself, Nathan Lane, playing ironically a police officer who encounters Gomez and Morticia while they're trying to save Fester. I wasn't sure if it was the fact he was in this or playing a police officer that was more of a surprise. Broadway veteran Harriet Harris is also present as the snobbish mother of the perky but obnoxious child whom Ricci makes sure has a delightful come-uppance in the Thanksgiving Day musical play MacNichol and Baranski put on at camp. When Ricci adds in her own two cents for the treatment of the Indians, it added a lot of intelligent humanity to her somewhat devilish character. Of course, she won me over in the first film when she was selling lemonade and asked the girl scout if her cookies were made out of real girl scouts and told another little girl in the hospital that it wasn't the stork that brought her a new sibling, it was the fact that her parents had sex. Watching Ricci get even with the type of kids that made a lot of other kids miserable throughout their school years is poetic justice indeed, especially if it warns those like these twit-wits that this, too, could happen to you! Then, there's the camp counselors who may smile, laugh, jump and sing, but are as racist and perhaps even more evil than the Addams could ever think of being. In many ways, this isn't only better than the original, it's even twice as fun. There's a sense of dark comedy here that might raise eyebrows of audiences looking for good, clean fun, but as I stated in my review of the first movie, it's all innocent and a creative take on the original T.V. series and comic books. It's also sad, being one of Raul Julia's last films, and reminded me of the memory of the original Morticia (Carolyn Jones) who continued to work up almost until her death while fighting cancer on the daytime soap opera "Capitol". Dana Ivey returns, now Mrs. Cousin It Addams, with a little hairy bundle of joy. There's a delightfully sick but funny gag involving Lurch and the huge cake for Fester's bachelor party, and the finale scene with Ricci and Krumholtz might result in the viewer having the spit-take to end all spit-takes.