Done right, The Addams Family has the potential to be one of the most pure-fun franchises that Hollywood has. It’s a joyously macabre antidote to the white-picket-fence American dream, with a good old-fashioned gothic tradition and all the best bits of modern Halloween – severed limbs as a joke, big spiders, being very horny in a slightly weird way – thrown in.
In the 90s, the films The Addams Family and Addams Family Values took Charles Addams’s source material and played it along perfectly spooky lines, with Anjelica Huston and Christopher Lloyd vamping it up to the maximum and Christina Ricci playing a wonderfully psychotic little Wednesday. The question is, do you trust Netflix – the people who made both Tall Girl and Tall Girl 2, may I remind you – to carry on that fine tradition?
