Addams Family Values

12A94 min

Creepy and cookie and altogether ookie, Barrie Sonnenfield’s Addams Family Values sees the return of America’s favourite Gothic family. The sequel to Sonnenfield’s hugely successful The Addams Family (1991), the film brings back its stellar cast, led by Angelica Houston and Raul Julia as the passionate Morticia and Gomez, Christina Ricci as the deadpan Wednesday, Jimmy Workman as the gullible inventor Pugsley, and Christopher Lloyd as the ghoulish Uncle Fester. The story sees the family confronted by the intrusion of Fester’s new love interest, beautifully played by Joan Cusack as the Barbie-styled nanny Debbie Jellinsky, who marries Fester with plans to murder him and collect the inheritance. Comic antics ensue as she attempts to enact her devious plan but is repeatedly thwarted by Fester’s strangeness and fondness for electricity and fire. In keeping with every incarnation of the Addams Family, the pleasure of the film is the way in which each of the characters live up to our monstrous expectations. In the tradition of Charles Addams original comic series, the film overturns conceptions of ‘normality’ and ‘monstrosity’ by disrupting traditional family values and the notion of the all-American family, while at the same time presenting a family that is bound by blood, in every sense of the word. A visual delight and gloriously strange from start to finish, the film is a celebration of the pleasures of horror, and a big cold hug for the horror fan at Halloween.