The Addams Family Wish You "A Merry, Shh, Creepy Hallowe'en"

As part of my (slightly failed) attempt yesterday to stay up 24 straight hours watching horror movies and Halloween specials -- I fell asleep for fifteen minutes in the twentieth hour, and gave up totally with ninety minutes to go -- most of the day was spent catching up with older titles that I had not seen since they came out in theatres (Silver Bullet, Hollow Man, The Faculty, and the remake of House on Haunted Hill), ones I had never seen (the Santa Claus slasher To All A Goodnight), old favorites (Mr. Sardonicus), and creepy or special episodes of television series (the awkward Bones/Sleepy Hollow crossover event, and the re-teaming of Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi for the premiere of Ash vs. the Evil Dead, which freakin' rocked).

I also found a chance to revisit something that I had not seen since it played on network TV in 1977: an attempt to revive an old favorite show's original cast called Halloween with the New Addams Family. The entire main cast, except for Blossom Rock, was brought back -- John Astin as Gomez, Carolyn Jones as Morticia, Ted Cassidy as Lurch, Jackie Coogan as Uncle Fester, Felix Silla as Cousin Itt, Ken Weatherwax as Pugsley, and Lisa Loring as Wednesday -- but this time, the family has been shot on video and in color, which saps a lot of the ghoulishness out of the proceedings. The effects are also live, so we don't get Cousin Itt's speeded up speech, and it limits the effectiveness of Thing, the disembodied hand, along with some of the other weird and dangerous creatures within the Addams household.

What we do get is an hour and a half of some of the favorite Addams bits run -- nay, crushed -- into the ground. Do you like it, as I do, when Tish speaks French and drives her husband Gomez instantly mad with desire, causing him to kiss up and down her arm frantically? Then you will get what seems like a hundred variations on that slim gag (which I normally adore), not just between Gomez and Morticia, but numerous people in Halloween disguise as Gomez and Morticia (and all with ulterior motives), as well as the fairly creepy moves Gomez' brother, Pancho, continually makes on Tish. Sometimes we even see Gomez and Pancho kissing up both her arms at the same time. I suppose the intent was to make it all seem as manic as possible at the Halloween party, but it just gets so tiring after a very short while, and then you realize you are only halfway through the show.

There is also the unfortunate decision to gum up the works with younger versions of the original Addams kids, strangely called Wednesday Jr. and Pugsley Jr., while the real Wednesday and Pugsley pop up in the special. Why they didn't just say "Here is the Addams Family thirteen years later, and my, how the kids have grown!" is beyond me. The new kids are so bland as to be nothing more than ineffectual wallpaper, and their early scenes in the show, before the original Wednesday and Pugsley show up, only made things quite confusing from the start. However, all of the original cast members do just fine by their parts, and I especially enjoyed seeing Ted Cassidy getting slightly more to do as the butler Lurch.

But there was one part of Halloween with the New Addams Family that I truly enjoyed on the second viewing, and it was rather unexpected that I would. A couple of times early in the special, Morticia sits down at a piano and sings the opening line of a song, that I presumed she was writing, that starts "Christmas and Easter bring wonderful treasures..." We don't get to hear much more of this, or learn why she is singing it until much later. Following the silliness of the plot and the resulting Halloween party (with its multiple mixups and obvious jokes), the film culminates in a rather sweet ending, where the Addamses all gather to traverse up the stairways to visit their Halloween-loving and dearly departed Cousin Shy. On their slow, candlelit route, they sing the full carol at which Morticia hinted earlier: 

The lyrics hit all of the basic touchstones of a child's Halloween celebration, which are sometimes easy to forget about when adults muck about and try to sex and gore the holiday up too much:

"Christmas and Easter bring wonderful treasures
But spirits and pumpkins bring far greater pleasures.
Phantoms and ghosts make wonderful hosts
And every year they convene
To wish you a merry... shhhhhh... creepy Hallowe'en!

Scarecrows and blackbirds are always together.
Spiders spin cobwebs in overcast weather.
Cauldrons are brewing, and banshees are doing
A weird and ghastly routine
To wish you a merry... shhhhhh... creepy Hallowe'en!

This is a night of heavenly fright.
Witches on broomsticks are up to their tricks.
And poltergeists trail to the moon
Which looks like a silver balloon.

Frankenstein's monster is having a ball,
Scaring the goblins right off of the wall.
Boogeymen prance, and our favorite cats*
And children are king and queen.
They wish you a merry... shhhhhh... creepy Hallowe'en!"

The song is credited to lyricist David Levy and composer George Tibbles, who you might be interested to learn was the Oscar-nominated composer of The Woody Woodpecker Song in 1948. I found A Merry, Shh, Creepy Hallowe-en delightful, and it is easily the best part of the special. I just wish more of this reunion show made me feel the same way.

*Not quite sure on this line. I have seen others say it is "Boogeymen, bats and our favorite cats," but to me it is pretty clear that they are saying either "prats" or "prance" and not "bats". Anybody wishing to weigh in on this, hit me up in the comments section.

Rixflix A to Z: The Addams Family (1991)

The Addams Family (1991)

Director: Barry Sonnenfeld // Paramount; 1:39; color
Crew Notables: Charles Addams (New Yorker comic panels - source material); Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson (screenplay); Marc Shaiman (music); Owen Roizman (director of photography); Ruth Myers (costumes - AAN)
Cast Notables: Raul Julia, Anjelica Huston, Christopher Lloyd, Dan Hedaya, Christina Ricci, Judith Malina, Jimmy Workman, Elizabeth Wilson, Carol Struycken, Christopher Hart, Paul Benedict, Dana Ivey, John Franklin, Mercedes McNab.
TC4P Rating: 7/9

So, who would be Gomez Addams today? Since the untimely death in 1994 of Raul Julia, who made Gomez a far more physical if not even more romantic figure than when played initially on television by the great John Astin, the part of the Addams Family head has been filled by Tim Curry (in a straight-to-video third film for the series, Addams Family Reunion) and by Glenn Taranto on a short-lived revival of the original show in 1998. (I am going to refrain from comment on both Curry’s and Taranto’s performances, as I have not actually seen either one.) Curry seems a natural choice to have played the role at some point, though judging from the critical reception of that particular piece, he would not be offered the role again. So, barring the possibility that Julia has actually been in hiding for almost 15 years and not deceased, who would play the part should there be interest in another film? Or has the Addams “fad-dams” wore itself out for this and the next generation?

I ask merely because I was never ready for the family to go away after only two films. Julia, sadly, in the words of Neil Diamond, was “done too soon”. But Gomez is a character clearly more than perfectly suited to interpretation, having successfully gone through an original single-panel comic version with nearly zero in the way of background, who got a voice from Astin and became a TV sitcom dad (albeit one with a smartly sadistic streak), who become a somewhat stiffly animated Hanna-Barbera cartoon character (who even met up memorably with Batman and Robin), who went back to getting played by Astin in a Halloween movie, who then took a long dirt nap for a decade-and-a-half, finally morphing into the far slicker rapscallion endowed by the late Julia. And that was where I found myself in 1991, sitting in a theatre to watch a movie version of a beloved TV show that I just knew was going to turn out rotten.

And then it didn't. Not by a long shot. For every twenty or so bad TV-to-movie adaptations, there seems to be one that makes the effort worthwhile. Though I certainly love the television series, having grown up seeing it in syndication many time, the version of the Addamses as portrayed in the first two movies is certainly the best filmed version, going far beyond Julia and creating indelible impressions through most of its characters. The beloved Thing, the body-challenged hand, through some marvelously creative special effects and the expressive hands of magician Christopher Hart, is finally free of his box and allowed to roam the world as the most helpful helping hand a family could ever need. Wednesday, merely a cute and annoying child in the series, becomes the very model of the modern psychopathic child via the monotonic threats of Christina Ricci, all pumpkin-sized forehead, beady-eyed and ghostly of pallor, whose every statement, even the most whispered ones, crawl from her mouth as the sharpest and most frightening of things. This is a girl who can and will do damage... eventually... (Ricci should have gotten an Oscar nomination.) As a counter-balance to his constantly scheming sister, Jimmy Workman as Puggsley comes off as sweet, though he has surely inherited his Uncle Fester's indestructible capabilities.

There are a couple of characters that don't work as well as I could have wished. As Fester, I still prefer Jackie Coogan. Christopher Lloyd, perhaps constrained by a storyline where he plays someone merely impersonating Fester (for the bulk of the film), never gets to cut loose here as much as he should. He will get a better showcase in the second film, even though they still found a way to tie him down there as well. However, it is probably the last decent role that Lloyd got in a film, at least, in a major one, and he acquits himself admirably. The role that does not work for me, and it has nothing to do with the decent performance by Carol Struycken, is that of the Frankenstein's Monster-like family butler, Lurch. The relatively slender Struycken has none of the sheer bulk that role originator Ted Cassidy had, nor does he have Cassidy's, to put it mildly, "unique" look. Cassidy's heavy features and monstrous proportions perfectly played off Lurch's gentler soul (he was a master on the harpsichord, you know); as a contrast, the filmmakers only give Lurch a handful of sight gags that never really gel with the rest of the film.

But then these is Morticia. Ms. Huston, looks-wise, has never been my cup o' espresso, but all Gothed-up as Gomez' sexual tormentor, she is downright sexy. You believe every second why her husband would howl at the moon, mad out of his mind over lust for her. Their dance sequence midway through the film literally burns up the dance floor, and it is easy to see why. At their own party, as it is in real life, Gomez and Morticia outdo in romantic fervor every single surrounding couple, even the most lustful among us. The television series had to remain mostly chaste regarding Gomez and Morticia's love-life; some suggestiveness snuck through, but theirs was still a '60s sitcom sort of love. In the film versions, they are allowed a little more freedom to express their intimations, but not too far. Theirs is still a love that is left largely to the imagination, but that just makes it all the hotter. Cara mia!

RTJ