The Addams Family (1991)

Welcome everyone to another “Halloween Month,” where once again, I will only be posting reviews every Friday unless I watch another Halloween related movie and want to review that this month. This year I would like to keep the lighthearted, funny Halloween movies, so this year I will be looking at “The Addams Family” franchise. I knew of them since I was a kid, and I remember watching glimpses of their live action show from the 90s that DiC produced, if I remember correctly. However, let’s look at their very first film from 1991, “The Addams Family.”

James Kendrick started his review by saying, “The opening of Barry Sonnenfeld’s The Addams Family recreates in morbidly humorous, loving detail one of Charles Addams’s most famous New Yorker cartoons, in which the titular family perches atop their decrepit mansion, preparing to pour a cauldron of boiling oil on a group of beaming Christmas carolers. It’s exactly the kind of delightful, misanthropic black comedy that made Addams’s cartoon creations so famous, leading to numerous adaptations in other media, most famously the 1960s television series that introduced not only the instantly iconic, snappy theme music, but also gave the characters their names (they went nameless in Addams’s comic panels).”

When Barry Sonnenfeld’s film came out in 1991, the Addams Family had been not been seen for quite some time, with no appearances on film or television over the course of a decade and a half (the last large Addams film was a 1977 television reunion movie “Halloween With the New Addams Family”). So their re-appearance at the end of the Reagan/Bush presidency felt like a really bad type of sad fun, given an extra amount of energy by the perfect casting of the late Raul Julia as the wide-eyed, highly, enthusiastic head of the family Gomez Addams, the agile, sharp Anjelica Huston as his majestic wife Morticia, Christopher Lloyd as the sneering, powdered-white Uncle Fester, and Christina Ricci (then unknown) and Jimmy Workman as Wednesday and Pugsley, the family’s preteen children whose idea of fun and games involves electric chairs and guillotines.

Kendrick noted, “Sonnenfeld, who was making his feature-directing debut after a decade-long career as an ace cinematographer, primarily for Joel and Ethan Coen’s early films, turned out to have a perfectly attuned sensibility, as he captures the family’s droll humor with just the right mixture of morbidity and genuine care; he gets the idea of the American Gothic-gone-humorous.” Many of the laughs in “The Addams Family” is around the way the family’s value system reflects the traditional American family while at the same time upsetting everything it is about. Love is still love in the “Addams Family” world, but normal is not normal. Hence, Gomez is sure to be supportive and free of Pugsley’s achievements, even when said achievement involves stealing stop signs to cause car accidents. Similarly, Gomez and Morticia’s strong romance and passion for each other should be put on a type of pedestal to long-married couples that the love will never die but will grow stronger as the years go by. Kendrick said, “The fact that Gomez’s terms of endearment and ribald passion for his wife saunters happily into the realm of gleeful caricature only makes it that much more enjoyable (Julia, a veteran of the stage, knows how to really ham it up).”

Obviously, there must be a story in the film to follow all the jokes, and screenwriters (and Tim Burton collaborators) Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson come up with a plan involving a devious fake psychologist named Dr. Greta Pinder-Schloss (Elizabeth Wilson) passing off her son Gordon (Lloyd) as Uncle Fester, who in this movie has been missing for years. It’s all a scheme to steal the upper-class Addams family’s large wealth, and Gomez is so relieved of his long-lost brother’s return that he is not able to recognize what is happening right in front of him. Obviously, there is always so much going on in the dark halls of the Addams house, whether it be Granny (Judith Malina) cooking up a witch’s brew of some kind or the hand known as Thing (Christopher Hart) running through the hallways and getting caught on one of Pugsley’s skates. Kendrick ending his review by saying, “Pugsley and Wednesday pretty much steal the show every time they’re on screen, although they function as little more than interstitial punchlines to break up the action (when Pugsley asks what game they are playing as Wednesday straps him into an old electric chair, she answers in perfectly deadpan fashion, “It’s called ‘Is There a God?’” It is in such moments that we recognize how these characters initially grew out of one-panel comics, and most of the best material in The Addams Family oscillates between such one-off jokes and a—dare I say it?—endearing affection for this misfit family, whose commitment to their own offbeat existence is a grand achievement to which we should all strive.”

If you haven’t seen this film, and you have/have not seen anything Addams Family related, or are familiar with them, see it. You will love the lighthearted comedy that fits will for the month of Halloween. How can you not be singing/humming the theme song to “Addams Family” during the month of Halloween? It’s one of the most famous theme songs ever. Still, this is a must because it is a classic that everyone should see. Check it out and have an enjoyable time.

How is the sequel to this film, you ask? Stay tuned next week to find out in “The Addams Family Month.”