I ask of you, what is the best way to celebrate the blessed month of Halloween filmically? Runthrough of a popular slasher franchise? Binging on old Universal horror entries? Exploring silent horrors of the 20s, going abroad for some foreign horror flicks you've never scoped, wallowing in the misery of some modern torture porn feature? Over on Letterboxd, there's a whole October-long challenge called Hooptober, dedicated to encouraging the userbase broaden their experience with the ol' spooks and seek out some scary movies they've never seen before. Me, though? I prefer to keep things small. Got too many challenges going on otherwise to dedicate a whole month to just the spooky stuff. Slip in something breezy and easy between it all, for some nice evening viewing with friends. Casual, homey viewing!
In practice, this translates out to watching a bunch of old made-for-television Halloween movies with friends on the expectation that we will all suffer, because I am a horrible person.
Is it fair for me to bag on Halloween with the New Addams Family for its low-budget production values and poor writing, which scans like occasional Munsters contributor George Tibbles wrote it in a mad rush one afternoon before shooting? TV wasn't exactly home to many prestigious names back in the 70s, in those days before premium channels and cinematic trend-chasing dominated the airwaves. Surely this was far more acceptable in its own time? Too bad for this special, I got the itch to check out an episode of the original series right afterwards, and let me tell you, this thing has no excuses. Halloween, Addams Style, a second-season episode of the original run, boasts a far more appealing visual style between the denser set dressing on the house, the smarter use of screen space in framing the actors, and the far cleaner, crisper look the black-and-white footage gives everything. It sees the same actors delivering jokes in much the same spirit with far more aplomb, nailing the timing and making even old comedy staples like "We need the jawbone of an ass" "Well don't look at me!" feel charming and enjoyable. Things HAPPEN - I can't stress this one enough, it runs a third of the time as the special, yet it keeps finding new, dynamic things for the family to do, and milks all the potential of "A neighbor tells Wednesday witches don't exist, so her parents hold a seance to contact a dead relative while Lurch and Grandmama try to either find a witch at this time of night or fake one" in a good twenty minutes. They've even got a fun bit about bobbing for apples on a giant seesaw. The whole thing makes good comfort watching, and speaks to the energy and dynamics that made the series such a crowd favorite for decades to come.
Comparatively, Halloween with the New Addams Family has none of this. The switch to color taping doesn't do the far more barren manor any favors, and the camera is frequently placed wherever it's quickest and cheapest to get the shot, which further highlights how drab and empty everything looks. Eleven years away from the characters did the adult cast no favors, and while they all have their individual vibes down, the timing's just all wrong. I can't put much blame on them in this respect, though, as the jokes are incredibly repetitious and poorly written, and apparently directed to be read the same way on each loop - I lost track of how many times they wrung Gomez and his brother going wild over Morticia speaking French with no variation on the gag around two dozen, and dully accepted the next fifty or so. This is when the special's writing actual jokes, and not making already tired, hacky references to Star Wars and Life cereal commercials. And as to what's actually going on...
There's just no excuse. We're on television, where you're liable to lose the audience if the pacing flags too much. It takes the length of an entire episode of the original show and then some before the whole Addams clan is assembled once more, and it's to practically no effect. All the adults are around from the word go, and before we can introduce grown-up Wednesday and Pugsley as they arrive home for a family Halloween party, we get bogged down in following an ill-defined spy wandering through the house getting freaked out. Make no mistake, "normal stranger comes to the Addams' house and gets freaked out" was a standard plot for the old series, but they rarely ran the idea for twenty minutes straight with but three jokes to spread around. Once the actual party gets underway, it's much more of the same, just in different configurations. Gomez gets kidnapped, plays morse code on his piccolo, gets rescued by Wednesday and Cousin Itt while remaining none the wiser. Bad guys stomp their feet and tear their hair in frustration before trying the same plan again. More, more, always more repetitions of "Tish! That's French!" to the point where I wanna die! And the weirdness... oh, the weirdness!
Not GOOD weirdness, mark you. Not ADDAMS weirdness. Short-sighted TV writing weirdness. Going in, I was not expecting so much of the special to revolve around Gomez feeling insecure in his marriage and suspecting his brother and a masked doppleganger of cucking his wife, but it's the direction they took, and we all have to deal with it through each unfunny moment. There are, for reason I could not begin to explain, two large, burly, near-naked muscle men roaming the Addams manor throughout the second half. I'm pretty sure they're hired tough guys for the antagonists, but why they all had to look like BIG JIM SLADE simply eludes me. It's all sexualized and borderline raunchy in a way that feels alien to the tone we're otherwise shooting for, and yet it takes up so, SO much of the special's runtime. Anytime something like this crops up, it's like taking a sledgehammer straight to the face, and with as many instances to sex-driven jealousy or oiled-up musclemen you get here, there's not much recognizable as a face left by the end.
If you'll permit me an indulgence, I simply must ramble about the odd little thing which bothers me most: Gomez and Morticia have birthed two new children between the original series and this special, and their names are Wednesday Jr and Pugsley Jr. For some reason, THIS bothers me far more than the uncomfortable marital troubles or the out-of-place bodybuilders, likely because it is so easily explained with faulty real life reasoning. We want the family dynamic from the original series to remain the same and we want the whole original cast back for the reunion, but the actors for Wednesday and Pugsley are grown-up and wouldn't be living at home anymore, so we'll get them back and have two NEW children for the parents to raise! Fine idea, except when you remember that Wednesday and Pugsley would still be living at home when their new siblings were born, and yet Gomez and Morticia looked at their latest progeny and thought to themselves "Same names." Maybe you could have some fun with that weirdness, make jokes about an Addams tradition of creating identical twins no matter the cost, except they don't display even this level of creativity. The new children are just THERE - they never deliver any jokes, they're never the subject of jokes, they don't figure into any comedic scenario, and they vanish from the film entirely once the party starts. Write 'em out! They're dead weight! They're not funny! Somebody show some sign they put effort into this!
(Important to note, however: Everything with Thing and Lurch is golden. I support them in all their endeavors, and am glad they both find meaningful romance in this special, even if Lurch has his cruelly ripped away.)
As one might guess, Halloween with the New Addams family leaves me with very little material to write about. The poor quality is clearly the result of a director, writer, and production team who only wanted to spin the wheels for a good hour in the hopes of getting picked up for a new series, and so it is bad in obvious, uninteresting ways. Lazily written and badly told jokes, a cast without much spark behind their eyes, lifeless filming, plodding plotting, tedious re-dos of the same material. Unless I want to write a lengthy diatribe on the exact psychosexual reasons all the "Oh no, my wife is screwing another man who looks just like me!" comedy is so deeply uncomfortable, I can't do much except rant and pick nits at this thing. There's a reason it hasn't seen an official release since the days of VHS. At least we had an excuse to watch an episode of the original series, which I highly recommend over this.
(Absolute worst thing about this special? Those near-silent, weakass snaps during the theme song. Get a proper sound designer, you absolute animals.)
1.5/5
There's just no excuse. We're on television, where you're liable to lose the audience if the pacing flags too much. It takes the length of an entire episode of the original show and then some before the whole Addams clan is assembled once more, and it's to practically no effect. All the adults are around from the word go, and before we can introduce grown-up Wednesday and Pugsley as they arrive home for a family Halloween party, we get bogged down in following an ill-defined spy wandering through the house getting freaked out. Make no mistake, "normal stranger comes to the Addams' house and gets freaked out" was a standard plot for the old series, but they rarely ran the idea for twenty minutes straight with but three jokes to spread around. Once the actual party gets underway, it's much more of the same, just in different configurations. Gomez gets kidnapped, plays morse code on his piccolo, gets rescued by Wednesday and Cousin Itt while remaining none the wiser. Bad guys stomp their feet and tear their hair in frustration before trying the same plan again. More, more, always more repetitions of "Tish! That's French!" to the point where I wanna die! And the weirdness... oh, the weirdness!
Not GOOD weirdness, mark you. Not ADDAMS weirdness. Short-sighted TV writing weirdness. Going in, I was not expecting so much of the special to revolve around Gomez feeling insecure in his marriage and suspecting his brother and a masked doppleganger of cucking his wife, but it's the direction they took, and we all have to deal with it through each unfunny moment. There are, for reason I could not begin to explain, two large, burly, near-naked muscle men roaming the Addams manor throughout the second half. I'm pretty sure they're hired tough guys for the antagonists, but why they all had to look like BIG JIM SLADE simply eludes me. It's all sexualized and borderline raunchy in a way that feels alien to the tone we're otherwise shooting for, and yet it takes up so, SO much of the special's runtime. Anytime something like this crops up, it's like taking a sledgehammer straight to the face, and with as many instances to sex-driven jealousy or oiled-up musclemen you get here, there's not much recognizable as a face left by the end.
If you'll permit me an indulgence, I simply must ramble about the odd little thing which bothers me most: Gomez and Morticia have birthed two new children between the original series and this special, and their names are Wednesday Jr and Pugsley Jr. For some reason, THIS bothers me far more than the uncomfortable marital troubles or the out-of-place bodybuilders, likely because it is so easily explained with faulty real life reasoning. We want the family dynamic from the original series to remain the same and we want the whole original cast back for the reunion, but the actors for Wednesday and Pugsley are grown-up and wouldn't be living at home anymore, so we'll get them back and have two NEW children for the parents to raise! Fine idea, except when you remember that Wednesday and Pugsley would still be living at home when their new siblings were born, and yet Gomez and Morticia looked at their latest progeny and thought to themselves "Same names." Maybe you could have some fun with that weirdness, make jokes about an Addams tradition of creating identical twins no matter the cost, except they don't display even this level of creativity. The new children are just THERE - they never deliver any jokes, they're never the subject of jokes, they don't figure into any comedic scenario, and they vanish from the film entirely once the party starts. Write 'em out! They're dead weight! They're not funny! Somebody show some sign they put effort into this!
(Important to note, however: Everything with Thing and Lurch is golden. I support them in all their endeavors, and am glad they both find meaningful romance in this special, even if Lurch has his cruelly ripped away.)
As one might guess, Halloween with the New Addams family leaves me with very little material to write about. The poor quality is clearly the result of a director, writer, and production team who only wanted to spin the wheels for a good hour in the hopes of getting picked up for a new series, and so it is bad in obvious, uninteresting ways. Lazily written and badly told jokes, a cast without much spark behind their eyes, lifeless filming, plodding plotting, tedious re-dos of the same material. Unless I want to write a lengthy diatribe on the exact psychosexual reasons all the "Oh no, my wife is screwing another man who looks just like me!" comedy is so deeply uncomfortable, I can't do much except rant and pick nits at this thing. There's a reason it hasn't seen an official release since the days of VHS. At least we had an excuse to watch an episode of the original series, which I highly recommend over this.
(Absolute worst thing about this special? Those near-silent, weakass snaps during the theme song. Get a proper sound designer, you absolute animals.)
1.5/5
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