‘I’m a homicidal maniac, they look just like everyone else…’
My relationship with The Addams Family is an odd one. I know all the characters intimately but I can’t remember ever watching the films when I was a kid. Perhaps I used to watch the cartoon. I don’t remember. Regardless, I didn’t know much about this film. While I found it lacking in any real depth, it’s still a tasty Halloween treat…
The Addams Family, consisting of patriarch Gomez (Raul Julia), his adoring wife Morticia (Anjelica Huston) and their children Wednesday (Christina Ricci) and Pugsley (Jimmy Workman) are thrown into disarray by the return of their long-missing family member Uncle Fester (Christopher Lloyd) but all is not as it seems.
The plot is the issue here. It’s weak, predictable and mostly dull. It’s a shame because the cast is incredible. Lloyd exudes manic energy and childlike enthusiasm while Julia and Huston share an electric chemistry. The former has all the funniest lines and the latter perfectly captures the cat-like insouciance of Morticia Addams. Indeed, the one good thing about the script is that it is funny in places, it’s just the jokes feel a bit lost in unnecessary plot contrivances. This was Men in Black director Barry Sonnenfield’s first film after serving as a director of photography for many years and he undoubtedly has an eye for making the titular family and their home feel like they fit in the real world rather than the fairytale fantasy world that Tim Burton likes to dream up (along with Terry Gilliam he was asked to direct this film but both of them turned it down).
Visually, The Addams Family is great and it’s easy to see why it has endured as a Halloween classic for so long. As with Hocus Pocus, this film screams ‘autumn’. With a better script, it could have been an all-time classic.
