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Addams Family Values is essentially a series of one-liners and sight gags tied around a slightly less dumb plot involving the attempted theft of Uncle Fester's fortune by a "black widow" divorcee. It also features swirling camera angles and excessive visual flourishes, but wastes no time in plunging us into the Addams' world. Rudnick's conceit, which he aims to skewer from every angle, is to show the Addams family - who would seem to be the ultimate outsiders with all of their death obsessions, BDSM quirks and occasional homicidal behavior - as a paragon of all those "values" that we claim to uphold as exemplars of proper American behavior. Gomez and Morticia are deeply in love. To even imagine one of them cheating on the other is unthinkable. They deeply value time with their children, Wednesday and Pugsley, live in the lap of luxury (after a fashion), treat their servants like members of the family, have a number of extended family members living with them, and, one imagines, would pine away to nothing if they were separated from each other or their kin. Debbie, the murderess (a game Joan Cusack who gets to be sexier and more evil than she normally is allowed) who sets her sight on Uncle Fester, is not a villainess so much because she is a killer, but because she threatens to tear the family apart. Well, that and her love of pastels.

The one-liners are more plentiful and more venomous the second time (all on par with the great "Girl Scout cookies" exchange in the first film) and most have them have been given to Christina Ricci, who used Addams Family Values as her coming out party (as it were) before moving on to more adult roles - though she did have to make it through Casper and Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain first. With her dead face and flat delivery, Ricci delivers one priceless line reading after another, and in one scene goes through the most incredible range of facial expressions, as, for very specific reasons, she must form a smile.

Rudnick's masterstroke is to have Debbie convince Gomez and Morticia that the children secretly want to be sent to summer camp. These scenes take up a large portion of the film and Rudnick lampoons everything from cheesy musicals to first love. It's interesting to consider how Ricci's handling of the scene where Wednesday hijacks the camp director's Thanksgiving musical foreshadows her turkey day diatribe as Wendy Hood in The Ice Storm. Also, her skill with these sarcastic bon mots made her the perfect choice for the lead in Don Roos' The Opposite of Sex, where she approximates a comic, sexed-up, not-so-dumb-blonde femme fatale riff on her Addams character.

In rewatching Addams Family Values, I was reminded of how deeply the film is littered with great character actors in roles large and small. Nathan Lane has a cameo as a put-upon cop. A young David Krumholtz plays Wednesday's crush and matches her for deadpan weariness. Christine Baranski and Peter MacNicol are the too-chipper-for-their-own-good camp directors. Mercedes McNab (later to gain fame as Harmony on Buffy and Angel) returns from her cameo in the first film and nails the rich young blonde diva/bitch caricature perfectly. Tony Shalhoub and Cynthia Nixon are there for blink-and-you'll-miss-them bit parts.

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