Meet the strange and spooky Addams Family: vampish Morticia (Huston) and her husband Gomez (Julia), their children Wednesday (Ricci) and Pugsley (Jimmy Workman), Frankenstein-lookalike butler Lurch (Carel Struycken), and the hand with a life of its own called Thing. Not your average family to be sure – Wednesday sleeps with a headless doll and tries to kill her brother by strapping him to the family’s electric chair or chasing him with an axe, Morticia snips the heads off roses and puts the stems in a vase, while Gomez casually hits golf balls off the mansion’s roof into the house next door.
The plot involves the return of Uncle Fester (Lloyd), who disappeared years before only to return to claim his half of the huge Addams estate – but forget the story, it’s the scenes showing this weird group who literally ‘raise the dead’ and enjoy pouring the contents of a bubbling cauldron over unsuspecting carol singers that are the best part of this hilarious film.
The Addams Family is based, of course, on the cult TV series of the sixties (itself based on Charles Addams’s cartoons), but this new version has the added attractions of a five-star performance from a very young Christina Ricci as Wednesday and – hey! – MC Hammer singing ‘The Addams Groove’. Dark and very funny, but because of its spooky nature, perhaps not suitable for very young viewers.
Is The Addams Family (1991) suitable for kids? Here are our parents’ notes...
As mentioned above, this is a darkly comic film that is probably too much for the under-eights who won’t understand its twisted humour. If your child doesn’t like things that go bump in the night (as there are lots here) – avoid!
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