tek's rating:

Addams Family Values (PG-13)
IMDb; Paramount; Rotten Tomatoes; Wikia; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Google Play; iTunes; Vudu; YouTube

The sequel to The Addams Family. Morticia and Gomez have a baby, whom they name Pubert. Wednesday and Pugsley resent the new baby, and repeatedly try to kill him. So their parents try to hire a nanny, though of course the kids scare them all off. Then a woman named Debbie Jellinsky (Joan Cusack) shows up, and she's perfect. And Fester immediately develops a crush on her. She likes him, too, but we learn very early on that she's a black widow who has killed a couple of husbands before, and now has her sights set on marrying and killing Fester for his money. Wednesday is suspicious, so Debbie tricks Morticia and Gomez into sending the children away to summer camp. Camp Chippewa is run by a cheerful couple named Gary and Beck Granger (Peter MacNicol and Christine Baranski). Naturally Wednesday and Pugsley don't fit in at all. And there's one camper, a girl named Amanda Buckman, who becomes an adversary. (During the end credits I learned she was played by Mercedes McNab and I was all "Holy crap! That was Harmony?" ...In case you don't know, she later played a vampire in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Oh, also she had played a girl scout in a very brief scene in the first Addams movie, though I don't think it was the same character, here.) But there was also a kid named Joel Glicker, a fellow outcast who became close to the Addamses, and developed a potential romance with Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Fester does indeed marry Debbie, and she tries to kill him, but fails. But that half of the plot isn't nearly as much fun as the Camp Chippewa plot. I mean, it's decent, but... whatever. Um... what else can I say? The actress playing Grandmama in this movie replaced the one from the first movie. The new actress is Carol Kane, so obviously the character is more awesome now, even though she doesn't get a lot of scenes. Oh, also I neglected to mention in my review of the first movie that Tully had a wife named Margaret, who ended up leaving him for Cousin Itt Addams. Which is pretty ironic, considering she originally wanted nothing to do with the family, because they're so weird, and Itt is probably the weirdest of them all. But anyway, she's married to him now, and they appear in a couple of scenes in the second movie. Um... so, anyway, there's eventually a play put on at Camp Chippewa, a dramatization of the first Thanksgiving, in which Wednesday is forced to play Pocahontas (Pugsley is a turkey). Joel is also playing an Indian, as are a bunch of other outcasts of no importance to the plot at all. But they were necessary to help implement the Addamses' plan... which is incredibly awesome, of course (outdoing the school play from the first movie).

So... seriously, I don't want to spoil too much about the movie. So I'll shut up. But the plot was more complex than the first movie, and a bit more macabre. And funnier. And stuff.


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