2019

I admit it. I’m tiptoeing back into scary movies, but also children could read my blog and they don’t deserve to be left out. Who am I kidding? Kids today are scary. They know how to code. They know ALL of the names of the Paw Patrol characters and how their jobs relate to a larger problem of authoritarianism. They know how to say “red” and “blood” and “maniac” in 5 different languages thanks to YouTube. I don’t ever want to be on the wrong side of a child’s anger.

Even though I’m loathe to like scary things, I did love the 1990’s The Addams Family and sequel and have grown to appreciate their appeal the older I get. So when I heard they were remaking it, I got excited when I started to see the cast announcement, knowing nothing else:

_{Oscar Isaac (yes, perfect little weirdo he will do great), Catherine O’Hara & Martin Short (never miss a chance to see them), Charlize Theron (…ok interesting choice), Snoop Dogg….Chloë Grace Moretz (what–she’s like 22), ohh dangit! This is an animated movie. I’m not the target demographic. Carry on.}

But I saw this come on Hulu when my husband reminded me it existed (because our devices are always listening…) and decided to make it my first movie. I’ve noticed the off-the-cuff comparison of “traditional” TV families versus the the Addams Family in the last few years. It’s not hard to do. Morticia and Gomez are a loving couple that provides a home for their children to explore their ideas and is very supportive of each other’s hobbies and interests. The extended family offers their own quirks, but really, who doesn’t have a rando in the family tree who marches to their own drum circle.

This film offers a brief background as to how the Addams Family establishes their house, explains that the children are home schooled, and also why they haven’t had neighbors. Until now.

Several decades ago, if you lived on inhabitable land, chances are, no one else was going to try to also live there. Safe from development, corporate greed, and climate change because it has built in protection: humans should NOT live there. Obviously that’s not the case anymore and a small underlying message of this film: if you drain the marsh, be prepared for what you find crawling around.

An HGTV-esque suburban “town” is built downhill from the Addams Family mansion for a TV show. Think Celebration, Florida with the deeply disturbing voyeurism of The Truman Show. Once the show’s host and producer realizes the Addams Mansion is an eye-sore, and meets the “freaks,” she is on a mission to destroy them before they destroy her “perfect” development. She does so by posing as different citizens on the town’s version of NextDoor. If you’re not familiar with the absolute bananas insanity that exists in NextDoor, you probably are too millennial to afford a house or too off-the-grid to want a house. It’s like if you took away the cute puppy photos and social engineering surveys off Facebook and was left with the complaining about nothing and the racism. Which I guess is Facebook anyways, but it’s condensed to just people you could possibly see at the grocery store.

There’s several other story lines throughout the film, but in the end the movie is just about family and accepting each other’s flaws and differences. It’s a cute movie, not scary. However there’s a few disturbing images that some younger viewers (or those with arachnophobia) might not like.

Scare Rating: 2 out of 10 ghosts