Movies
[Review] New Animated Movie ‘The Addams Family’ Aims to Entertain Kooky Kids
It’s been 81 years since Charles Addams introduced the world to The Addams Family, a clutch of morbid weirdos whose monstrous appearance and ghoulish activities were but a thin veneer for an otherwise wholesome and loving American family. Those original comic strips appeared in The New Yorker and were not specifically intended for children, and the original sitcom which aired from 1964-1968 (and lived on for decades in popular reruns) tended to focus on the amorous domestic foibles of Gomez and Morticia Addams rather than on their creepy kids, Wednesday and Pugsley. But the appeal to children was right there from the beginning. Who hasn’t felt like their family was full of freaks?
So it’s hardly shocking that Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon’s new animated Addams Family movie is – even more than Barry Sonnenfeld’s beloved, blockbuster “family” movies – kids stuff. The filmmakers may be most famous for co-directing the biting religious satire Sausage Party but they’re still the folks who gave you Thomas & Friends and Shrek 2, and it’s those sensibilities that they brought to this insubstantial but adequate adaptation of Charles Addams’ creations.
The Addams Family begins with the wedding of Morticia (Charlize Theron) and Gomez (Oscar Isaac), who can’t even get through their nuptials before the local villagers show up with torches and pitchforks. As Gomez’s brother Fester (Nick Kroll) carries them to safety like a noble steed, they vow to find a new home where they will be free from persecution. Someplace “horrible,” “corrupt” and “where no one in their right mind would be caught dead in.”
So they move to New Jersey and take up residence in a haunted, derelict insane asylum where one of the inmates, Lurch (Conrad Vernon), stays on as their butler. Thirteen years pass and they have two horrible – read: wonderful, but also horrible – children, Wednesday (Chloë Grace Moretz) and Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard) who have lived in isolation, unaware that outside their gates, beyond the fog, lies a conformist suburban dystopia called “Assimilation.”
It’s a town where every house looks the same because reality TV host Margaux Needler (Allison Janney) made them that way, but now that she’s drained the swamp the fog has lifted, and Addams Family manor is a gigantic eyesore the whole town can see. So Margaux tries to convince the Addamses to conform, the Addamses try desperately to be accepted for who they are, and Wednesday starts going through a rebellious phase where she wears a pink unicorn barrette, much to the consternation of Morticia, who declares that “everyone knows pink is a gateway color.” Meanwhile, Pugsley is training for his Sword Mazurka, an Addams Family rite of passage that’s a bit like a Bar Mitzvah but with 100% more juggling of deadly blades.
Pugsley’s fear of disappointing Gomez and Wednesday’s efforts to mortify Morticia are the clear focus of this new Addams Family, and like the best stories in the series, they’re almost universally relatable situations but with little gothic twists. As an introduction to the classic characters for very young audiences, Tiernan and Vernon’s film may be just the ticket: it’s a simple but amiable cartoon romp, with a few creepy bits but generally acceptable for children.
Whether adults will be so accepting is another question. The Addams Family doubles down on the slapstick and “funny” music choices (the R.E.M. gag is worth a giggle), but the real humor in this franchise stems from the striking contrast between the Addams and seemingly “normal” society. But the society in Assimilation is anything but normal; it’s an oppressive Stepford suburb where the citizens are blank-faced automatons who are easily whipped into xenophobia by Margaux’s manipulations on social media. That part’s almost topical, but mostly the whole A-plot feels arbitrary and phony.
Visually, The Addams Family is frustratingly simplistic. The characters and their environments are often so sparse that they give the appearance of a modest TV special, instead of a theatrical presentation with a studio budget. It’s not an ugly film but at times it feels slightly unfinished, which only makes it harder to immerse yourself in its world.
Then again, this new Addams Family isn’t working overtime to make adults laugh. It’s trying to create an inviting world where children can find new avatars in Charles Addams’ old creations. It’s a film that celebrates the macabre and indicts the establishment, and transforms both sides into broad caricatures. It’s not particularly hilarious or clever, and that’s a shame because it’s got a pitch perfect cast who could do a lot with this material if the material was up to snuff. But once a new generation gets hooked on this version of the creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky family, they can start working their way backwards to the altogether ookier, and significantly more satisfying interpretations of these classic characters.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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