Memorable, crazy movie

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

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!

Two years after successfully returning to the focus of pop-culture with a thrilling and amusing big-budget Hollywood remake, that delightfully creepy and kooky family we all know, love and fear is back in "Addams Family Values", once again directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. Inspired by the delightfully dreary comics of series creator Charles Addams while taking plenty of inspiration from the classic 60's sitcom, I was a pretty big fan of the first "Addams Family" film. It was the rare revival that paid loving respect to what came before without feeling the need to satirize or talk down to the source material. But for my money, this 1993 follow-up is in every way a superior sequel. It raises the stakes. It piles on the laughs. And it finds the perfect balance between story and humor.The Addams Family gets a little bigger and crazier when Morticia (Anjelica Huston) gives birth to their newest addition- a bouncy baby boy named "Pubert." However, this doesn't sit well with siblings Wednesday (Christina Ricci) and Pugsley (Jimmy Workman), whom see their new brother as competition. In order to quell the growing rivalry between the children, Morticia and Gomez (Raul Julia) hire on a new nanny to watch after them. However, they are unaware that the attractive Debbie (Joan Cusack) is actually a serial killer known as the "Black Widow", with a penchant for marrying older men and then bumping them off for their money. And she has her sights set on Uncle Fester (Christopher Lloyd) and his enormous wealth!The thing I really admire about this film is how well it balances the ratio of story to humor and how the structure of the film is built for maximum effectiveness. A great part of the fun of the "Addams Family" concept is the fact that most of the humor comes from the contrast between their inherent insanity and typical middle and upper-class values. It's an idea built around subversion. And I think this film handles that very well by wisely dividing the story into three sort- of episodic adventures that place members of the clan in different situations. Those of course being the archetypal rivalry between siblings, a subsequent subplot involving Wednesday and Pugsley being sent to summer camp, and the overarching storyline about the deadly romance that forms between Debbie and Fester and how it affects the family as a whole. It creates opportunities to organically unleash the Addams' onto the world for comedic effect, and I found it functioned quite a bit better than the loose narrative of the original.Once again, the wild and wonderful ensemble cast shines through as the highlight of the film, and I like the fact that the movie shifts focus onto members of the family who weren't featured quite as heavily in the previous outing. The standouts here being the delightfully deadpan Ricci and amusingly mindless Workman as Wednesday and Pugsley, whose plot lines make up a good bulk of the film. There's a definite theme of youth in the movie, so it makes sense for the children to take the center stage, and both do very well with the material. Lloyd is as fun as ever as the hapless Fester, and it's fun seeing him try to cope with his general cluelessness when it comes to women and romance. Julia and Huston are as deliciously hammy as ever as the psychotic lovers that are Gomez and Morticia. And I really loved Cusack in her scene- stealing performance as the devious diva that is Debbie. Bonus points go to Carole Kane whom takes over the role of "Grandmama" with gusto and a young David Krumholtz as the neurotic Joel- a fellow camper who develops feelings for Wednesday.Also a step-up is the wondrous production assembled by Sonnenfeld and the twisted and hilarious script by playwright Paul Rudnick. The film is an aesthetic powerhouse with sharp, keen visuals and a brutally manic pace that lends itself exceptionally well to the material. Sonnenfeld injects such a sheer, voracious sense of spunk and fun into his visual storytelling that it's just infectious. You can't help but feel completely satisfied by the time the credits roll, and you feel like everyone put their hearts into the film. And the script is just fantastic. Almost every other line is punctuated by a clever gag, the pitch-black humor is out full force, and there's some really smart satire injected beneath the surface. You really couldn't ask for more out of an Addams story.Were I to point out any flaws, it's the fact that the movie makes one critical error that I can't help but notice. That being that once again, and despite the rampant creativity otherwise... the film is essentially built around a plot involving Fester and an attempt at extorting money from the family. Fester's plot-line is basically exactly the same as the first movie. Everything else is fresh and new... So why just regurgitate an almost identical plot-thread?Thankfully the film's grand humor, outstanding performances and wild visuals more than make up for this admittedly major flaw. 1991's "The Addams Family" was a solid and satisfying revisit to a cherished old property. But 1993's "Addams Family Values" sees that concept and one-ups it by improving over what came before in virtually every way. It's tighter. It's funnier. It's crazier. And indeed... it's kookier. This is one family reunion you'll want to revisit over and over again. And so, I give "Addams Family Values" an excellent 9 out of 10! A superior sequel in every way.

Envious of their parents' newborn baby, the Addams children repeatedly try to kill it before being sent away to summer camp by their scheming new nanny in this sequel to 'The Addams Family'. Often cited as superior to its predecessor, 'Addams Family Values' benefits from delving into the plot quicker with less time spent introducing the characters. What really raises the quality of the film though is the focus on Christina Ricci as Wednesday Addams, who receives the most screen time here after Christopher Lloyd. Her deadpan line delivery and emotionless facial reactions are better than ever, and a bit where she slowly forces a smile after being forced to watch Disney films is a real testament to her talents. Another big plus is Joan Cusack's ever-so-slightly demented performance as the nanny who seduces Lloyd for his money; her repeated failed attempts to kill him are even funnier than the kids failing to kill the baby early on. Witty and funny as the script often is though, the screenplay is not airtight; the transition between the film being about the children trying to kill the baby and the nanny trying to fleece their uncle is quite jarring. The experiences of Ricci at camp - where she encounters the same Girl Scout who tried to sell her cookies in the first film - are also far more interesting than Lloyd and Cusack having it out. This is an enjoyable film through and through, however, with all concerned really in top form. Whether this is truly superior to the first film may be debatable, but it is certainly a very good effort as far as sequels tend to go.

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.