This is part of a series of No Shame Movie Reviews. For reasons I won’t speculate and rant about now, we have been told that only some movies are worth enjoying. Only artsy movies with a meaningful and/or ambiguous message, perhaps. To that, I say phooey. I say that you should be able to watch and enjoy any movie you want – from low-budget children’s movies to dramas about the hopelessly romantic. If you enjoy them, then why the heck should you not be able to watch them without shame?
Happy Halloween, everybody! To celebrate this holiday with something other than a “sexy _____” costume and/or cheap beer, I’m going to watch a family favorite film: The Addams Family.
Somehow, in my attempts to find Halloween movies that are a) on Netflix and b) not scary, I picked two that are also vaguely about Christmas. I’m not sure what’s in the water over in Hollywood, but they just can’t keep their holidays separate. The very first scene of The Addams Family involves Christmas carolers (who end up getting tar poured over their heads, but that’s beside the point). But, The Addams Family belongs to Halloween, there’s no contesting that.
It has all the classic trademarks of the holiday. A creaky old mansion covered in cobwebs. Tattered black clothes. Graves and graveyards. An appreciative attitude towards everything dark or dead or tortured. Or preferably all three.
It’s not the plot of this movie that makes it Halloween – in summation, a loan shark’s son poses as the Addams’s long-lost uncle in order to trick them out of their fortune. Doesn’t sound very Halloween-y, does it? But it’s the atmosphere of the thing. It’s the morbid sense of humor, the macabre jokes that infuse themselves in every single scene. That makes it undeniably a movie to watch today – on All Hallows’ Eve (Halloween, for the non-pretentious people).
Now, this movie is absolutely ridiculous. It’s exaggerated in every possible way; so far over the top that normalcy isn’t even an option any more. If that’s your critique of The Addams Family – that it was “weird” – then you’ve missed the entire point. It’s supposed to be weird. Enjoy it.
Can we just talk about the fact that there’s a fully developed character who doesn’t have a single line of dialogue, so much as a single facial expression. His name is Thing and he’s nothing but a hand. A single, severed hand. But somehow he had so much depth to him. I knew what he was thinking. I related to him. I cared about what happened to him. A hand! If that’s not impressive filmmaking, I’m really not sure what is.
Somehow I’d never seen The Addams Family before I watched it for this review, and I was missing out. So what I would recommend, if you’re in the same boat I was, is to watch The Addams Family, get in that Halloween mood, and then get all dressed up and party. Sounds like a good way to spend Halloween to me.
And there we have it. Just a few of the reasons that you should not be ashamed to watch and enjoy The Addams Family. If you have any ideas for a movie that you want me to review, then let me know! Bad, fun, silly, adorable, enjoyable, romantic, anything that you shouldn’t be ashamed to watch and love! (Bonus cookies if it’s also on Netflix.)
Image Sources: Netflix, IMDB