The Addams Family

Based on The New Yorkers cartoon series, which was made into a television serial, the movies, The Addams Family and The Addams Family Values, about the eccentric (probably a mild term to describe them) Addams family, are hilarious, to say the least. What’s interesting here is that the fun comes not from the funny gags and cleaver one-liners, they are all there, but how the plot, and characters subvert everything that is considered ‘normal’. Consider the scene: The girl is chasing her brother with a meat knife. The mother stops her and give her an axe; that’s a proper weapon to kill.

Here’s a family for whom the graveyard is the best park in the world, where being a homicidal maniac is an achievement.

The premises are wonderful. The problem starts when they fall short of telling a story. But the characters inhabit the place as if they have lived there all their lives. Above all, the chemistry between Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia is just extraordinary.