Film
Bristol Film Festival: Addams Family Values
- Director
- Barry Sonnenfeld
- Certificate
- PG
- Running Time
- 95 mins
When they made the first Addams Family flick, the FX and sets were fine, but somebody forgot to bring a plot. This 1993 sequel had one: a mildly subversive send-up of Middle American values. It’s nothing to write home about, but with the one-gag novelty of the family’s moral inversions long since exhausted it does at least have the merit of widening the original premise, as any sequel seeking to justify its existence should.
An hilarious, briskly edited pre-credits sequence has Morticia (Anjelica Huston) announcing she’s going to have a baby and promptly giving birth to young Pubert: a typical Addams sibling already sporting his father’s moustache. Enter nanny Debbie (Joan Cusack), better known to viewers of America’s Most Disgusting True Crimes as the Black Widow, who specialises in marrying wealthy men and engineering their grisly post-honeymoon demises. Debbie tricks Morticia and Gomez (Raul Julia) into sending hostile kids Pugsley and Wednesday (Christina Ricci) to Summer Camp while she woos unsuspecting Uncle Fester (Christopher Lloyd), who possesses hitherto undisclosed riches.
The impressive visual style of the first film survives intact, as does the stream of memorable and often very funny one-liners. The funniest, most darkly satirical scenes are set in the Summer Camp, where a pair of grotesquely jolly airheads involve the blond(e)-haired, blue-eyed offspring of Middle America in an inane Thanksgiving pageant, while all the non-white, disabled and plain weird kids sit on the sidelines. Eventually, poor recalcitrant Pugsley and Wednesday are banished to the ‘Harmony Hut’ to be brainwashed with hours of Disney videos. Here the young Christina Ricci threatens to upstage even Anjelica Huston with a performance of supremely studied sourness in the face of unrelenting jollity. And don’t blink or you’ll miss the marvellously prescient moment when a young boy flees in horror from a poster of Michael Jackson.
is needed now More than ever
Incidentally, parents who fear their children may be too damn stupid to distinguish reality from fantasy should be warned that the film contains many delicious, knockabout scenes of electrocution and child abuse.
It’s on screen at Arnos Vale Cemetery as part of Bristol Film Festival‘s day of Spooky Cinema. Go here for tickets and further information.
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