Addams Family Values

“He has my father’s eyes.”

“Gomez, take those out of his mouth.”

Such is the tone of Addams Family Values, Barry Sonnenfeld’s charmingly spooky 1993 sequel to his original 1991 smash — one of those ultra-rare film follow-ups that actually betters its predecessor.

When the first Addams Family, adapted from the Charles Addams New Yorker single-panel cartoon and the 1964-66 cult TV show, was a surprise hit, a successor was fast-tracked by Paramount. Although original Grandmama Addams actress Judith Malina was swapped out for Carol Kane, the rest of the original cast was back in full.

The new flick kicks off with a living burial, and only gets more cheerfully morbid from there.

This time, there’s another new addition to the Addams clan: the fire-breathing, electricity-rerouting baby Pubert (Kaitlyn and Kristen Hooper). Even as a newborn, he already sports the mustache and haircut of his father Gomez (Raul Julia).

In a world with Home Alone/Looney Tunes rules of gravity and mortality, Pubert’s older siblings Wednesday (Christina Ricci, in probably her signature role as a kid actor) and Pugsley (Jimmy Workman) become threatened by the advent of their new baby brother, and grow obsessed with trying to kill the little guy. After Wednesday spent much of the first movie trying to murder Pugsley, it perhaps comes as little surprise that she has now enlisted her little brother to help her take care of their littler brother.

Their efforts are foiled — occasionally by good fortune or the baby’s growing super-strength.

Parents Morticia (Anjelica Huston, never without a special key light on her eyes a la the Bela Lugosi Dracula) and Gomez audition a cadre of new nannies in an effort to curb the older siblings’ bloodlust.

Perpetual bachelor uncle Fester (Christopher Lloyd), in between reading chapters of the dubiously-helpful self-help tome Strange Men And the Women Who Avoid Them, begins to appreciate that he has grown lonely.

These two storylines intersect when voluptuous femme fatale Debbie Jellinsky (Joan Cusack, pride of Evanston, Illinois) eventually books the gig — with obvious ulterior motives of seducing and killing Fester while making off with his money.

But Fester, you see, is an Addams, and thus magically impervious to normal methods of destruction. She quickly separates him — and his money — from the family, while ramping up her efforts to bump him off.

Wednesday instantly wises up to at least some of Debbie’s scheme (not so much the homicidal component), so Debbie tacitly convinces Morticia and Gomez to ship off the eldest kids to a sleepaway camp.

Wednesday and Pugsley quickly find themselves at odds with most of the preppy personnel at the Camp Chippewa — “America’s foremost facility for privileged young adults,” as the $20,000-a-head program is described by disturbingly, well, chipper camp owners/directors Gary Granger (Peter MacNicol) and Becky Martin-Granger (Christine Baranski).

Fester’s separation from the family causes some drastic ripples. Baby Pubert, sensing trouble, ditches his mini-mustache, sprouting blond curls and rosy cheeks. Grandmama warns that his new look could become permanent, and threatens that he could become a lawyer, orthodontist or even, heavens forfend, the U.S. president should Fester remain alienated. Gomez grows increasingly more untethered.

Meanwhile, at camp, the increasingly ostracized Addams children form an alliance with Wednesday’s neurotic crush, Joel Glicker (David Krumholtz), and a festering rivalry with Wednesday’s WASPy nemesis, Amanda Buckman (Mercedes McNab). The Grangers banish them multiple times to the camp’s ominously cheerful “Harmony Hut” for brainwashing, though the trio remains resistant.

Things come to a head in an absolutely iconic moment. Wednesday is coerced into portraying Pocahontas for a play celebrating the first Thanksgiving, and all the camp’s other unfairly maligned outcasts are conscripted to depict the other Native Americans. They stage a magnificent rebellion, buoyed by a painfully accurate Wednesday speech pointing out the ugly aftermath of that first holiday.

Debbie’s plan to tear Fester apart from his family, kill him and inherit his riches understandably unravels.

The funniest twist, perhaps, is that the Addamses are more or less aligned with Debbie’s homicidal mania. As she prepares to electrocute (almost) the whole clan, she shares a “Do you see?” slideshow, talking them through her incredibly flimsy rationale for killing her parents and two prior husbands as she fulfills Roger Ebert’s Fallacy of the Talking Killer.

In an inspired touch that would later be replicated to hilarious effect by the two Brady Bunch movie adaptations later that decade, the Addams Family series frames the Addams clan as being wholly at-odds with their dull, modern suburban environs. The wholesome bizarreness of the Addamses feels refreshingly honest and sweet, in contrast to their blandly beige yuppie contemporaries. You know, thwarted murders aside.

One of the great underappreciated sequels of the ’90s, Addams Family Values manages to expertly balance its macabre sensibility and inspired violence with some genuine sentiment, making it a subversively roundabout celebration of weird families everywhere.

Beyond just the Thanksgiving play moment, Addams Family Values (released just before Thanksgiving in 1993, November 17) becomes a true movie for the more surface-level meaning of the holiday, a commemoration of families both given and chosen, no matter how creepy and/or kooky.

“In a lot of ways, they are a perfect family, because they accept each other for who they are, they accept themselves for who they are, and they’re kind and loving and generous with each other, genuinely,” Ricci opined of the Addamses at a cast panel during L.A. Comic-Con 2024.

Sonnenfeld, who shot the Coen brothers’ first three movies as a cinematographer before transitioning to directing, may not be manning the lens this go-round, but his seasoned director of photography Donald Peterman continues to buzz around original James Bond production designer Ken Adam’s wild sets with a pleasantly Sonnenfeldian sensibility. The pitch-perfect cast delivers screenwriter Paul Rudnick’s gloriously ghoulish dialogue with scenery-chewing aplomb.

After Addams Family Values churned out solid box office coin ($110.9 million worldwide), a third theatrical franchise entry was planned. But following Julia’s untimely passing in 1994, aged 54, Paramount retreated. A direct-to-video sequel, Addams Family Reunion, arrived on VHS in 1998, recasting all the principles outside of Lurch actor Carel Struycken and Thing hand performer Christopher Hart.