ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES

ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES (Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. Starring Anjelica Huston, Raul Julia, Christopher Lloyd, Christina Ricci, Joan Cusack)

A sequel without a 2 or a II in the title at least demonstrates a modicum of imagination. This is more of the same, spectacular black comedy with a dead pan expression. It is strange that when Peter Greenaway mutilates a baby onscreen (in The Baby of Macon) we feel repulsed, but when the ghoulish Addams’ children devise a series of violent plans to do away with their baby brother (including dropping him off the roof and putting his little head in a pint-sized guillotine) we laugh. And give it a PG rating.

Perhaps it is because the Addams family’s values are the usual all-American ones: love and togetherness (even if they would never use those words). They may be more dysfunctional than the Jacksons, but they always stick together in the end.

After a spectacularly bright, gag-filled opening, twin plot strands attempt to divide the family, with Uncle Fester (Christopher Lloyd) being seduced by a murderous nanny with her eye on the family fortune (Joan Cusack) and the malevolent pubescents Wednesday and Pugsley (Christina Ricci and Jimmy Workman) being sent away to a WASP holiday camp before they do their little brother a serious injury (although the worst thing that happens to him, as it develops, is a sudden blast of rosy cheeked cuteness).

It takes till the end of the film to get them back together, to live unhappily ever after. The result is a meandering narrative with little thrust, enlivened by inventive one-off jokes and Sonnenfeld’s high visual style, and played out by a cast that is really too good for this nonsense.

Given the squeaky clean wholesomeness of most PG rated fodder, however, it is always refreshing to witness a triumph of perversity.