Addams Family Values Parent Guide

As the sixties generation yearns for the days of old, movie studios are always happy to oblige. The Addams Family began it’s very early life as a print cartoon in the upscale New Yorker magazine. But the family really found it’s place in society as a weekly television series some thirty years ago.

The Addams are opposite in every way. In the same vein as Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street, the Addams like things gloomy and are happiest when life is on the brink of death. Unlike Oscar, and unlike their rather innocent television series, today’s Addams get joy in doing things that are beyond funny, and are in plain poor taste.

The first portion of the movie has the two older Addam’s children, Wednesday and Pugsley, trying to kill their new baby brother, Pubert. Dropping him from the attic window followed by an attempt to cut his head off should give children in the audience new ideas for venting distress on their siblings.

The core of the plot revolves around a voluptuous blonde nanny named Debbie (Joan Cusack) who is hired to watch the children, but is really a serial murderer. She is after Uncle Fester’s (Christopher Lloyd) fortune, and is willing to marry the ugly man with the soft heart, so she can murder him on the honeymoon. More electrocutions and explosions later, and Fester is still alive in a festering plot.

If movies that lack respect for the value of life offend you, then don’t put your time into the Addam’s Family. The adult situations are problem enough, but with all the concern in the world about physical abuse to children, you may not find the scenes of a newborn baby about to fall to its death funny. Funny, neither did I.

About author

Rod Gustafson

Rod Gustafson has worked in various media industries since 1977. He founded Parent Previews in 1993, and today continues to write and broadcast the reviews in newspapers, on radio and (of course) on the Internet. His efforts also include writing and researching media in all its forms and observing how it effects society and culture. He and his wife Donna have four children.