BEFORE: OK, I'm back on horror movies, well, sort of. This is a cartoon one, so how scary could it possibly be? It's a hybrid of animation, comedy and spooky stuff, but I did say I wanted to get all these silly ones out of the way, so here goes. I think things kind of get progressively scarier from here, which is how it should be - the scariest movie should be saved for the big day on October 31, right?
I found a new band that does a lot of mash-ups, not spooky songs, but just mash-ups of popular songs, like not TRUE mash-ups that use the sound samples from several songs, these are more ones that they record themselves in a studio, incorporating elements and riffs from two or more songs. I found their mix of "Take on Me" and "99 Red Balloons" over the weekend on a long shift at the theater, like a 17 hour shift. The band is called Pomplamoose, I think their name is a riff on the French word for "grapefruit", which is "pamplemousse". They also mashed up "Sweet Dreams" by Eurhythmics with "Seven Nation Army" by White Stripes, and "I Will Survive" from Gloria Gaynor with "This Love" by Maroon 5, and "Every Breath You Take" by the Police with "500 Miles" by the Proclaimers. Now those are my kind of mash-ups, check them out on YouTube or Spotify if you get a chance - I'll be downloading all their covers and mash-ups as soon as I figure out how.
Yeah, I survived New York Comic-Con once again, two and a half days at a table in Artist Alley, with some time at the end of each day to walk around a bit and take some pics of the costumed crowd. Comic-Con is itself a mash-up, mixing comic books with movies, TV shows, panels, costuming, collecting, t-shirts, and now they're starting to add interesting food, too. I saw booths serving ramen, okonomiyaki, a bunch of different food trucks with too-huge lines, and so on. But I managed to survive on Egg McMuffins for breakfast and empanadas for lunch, because I didn't have time to wait in line for unique and interesting food. I miss the days of having a booth on the main show floor and catching some bulgogi hot dogs being served a few aisles away. And then once I made it through Friday and Saturday at Comic-Con, I had to work at the New Yorker Festival at the theater, and that was that LONG 17-hour shift, which ended at midnight. Got home at about 1 am this morning and still had to watch this movie before crashing. Tuesday I can sleep in and catch up on some sleep.
But really, I'm toggling between the silly-scary and the very scary, the horror chain makes for some strange neighbors sometimes, but Chloe Grace Moretz carries over from "Carrie" and she'll be here tomorrow when I get back to scary-scary.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Addams Family" (Movie #3,683)
THE PLOT: The Addams get tangled up in more wacky adventures and find themselves involved in hilarious run-ins with all sorts of unsuspecting characters.
AFTER: Well, now I'm thinking I should have dropped this one, or saved it for next year, where it could have helped me link to "Hocus Pocus" and "Hocus Pocus 2" via Bette Midler. Yeah, that might have been the smart move, because then I also wouldn't have to figure out another film to drop from this year's schedule, I'm still running one film over. I watched the first animated "Addams Family" feature just two years ago, I probably could have waited another year for the sequel. But I didn't, so it's too late to turn back now.
This film is just eighteen different kinds of dumb, that's all. It's corny dumb, it's makes-no-sense dumb, it's boring dumb and it's also just random-things-happening dumb. I don't see how a film studio just thinks they can throw a bunch of wacky happenstances into a random order and call that a movie. Sure, stuff HAPPENS in this film, but it felt like those things had zero chance of coming together and adding up to any kind of coherent storyline. So Wednesday feels disconnected from her family, SO WHAT? Who the hell cares? She's told that she's not really the child of Gomez and Morticia, and may have been switched at birth, which is doubtful because the animators designed her to look JUST like a tiny Morticia, so why wouldn't she be her daughter? Just like Pugsley is chubby and big-eyed and resembles his father - so come on, I knew from the start that Wednesday was mistaken or get bad intel on her parentage, because it's right there in the character design.
So her being told this makes no sense, her believing this falsehood makes no sense, and then of course once the reason for someone telling her this in the first place is revealed, that makes no sense. But that's just the main thing of like a hundred things that don't make sense - take Wednesday's science experiment, for example, where she demonstrates that she can make Uncle Fester smart by giving him a potion derived from the DNA of an octopus that can solve a Rubik's cube. But you just can't change someone's DNA by giving them something to drink, the digestive system does not lead to any system in the body that controls DNA. I drink a lot of Mountain Dew, but that doesn't get from my stomach to my cell nuclei, so I can't become part soda, that's just not how things work. It's done for laughs, of course, so that we can watch throughout the movie as Fester slowly turns into some kind of human-octopus hybrid, but that's not even all that funny, and furthermore, there's no pay-off. It's like a big set-up for a joke that somebody forgot to finish, where's the punch line? OK, so he does become a giant octopus monster for a bit - again, not funny, and it only tangentially counts for moving the plot, such as it is, forward.
But there are so many NITPICK POINTS to be made with the premise - like if Wednesday is some kind of child prodigy, a scientific genius, how come she doesn't do a DNA test like right away once her parentage is in doubt. Eventually she gets there, but why wasn't that the first stop? And then the reason for the DNA test failing doesn't make sense either, like she'd have to be really stupid to not have factored that in. So, which is she, smart or stupid? And I don't even think this is how DNA tests work, anyway. Would it kill some screenwriter to do a half-hour's research into how DNA testing functions? Because that's kind of important to the whole premise.
Instead there's this "noted scientist", Cyrus Strange, who has his belief that Wednesday is his real daughter, as the daughter he does have shows no interest in science. But not every kid develops the same interests as their parents, or goes into the same line of work. As a parent, he should know this, and as a scientist, he should be able to prove it, but damn, as a human he's not doing very well. What kind of message does this film send out to the kids, by depicting a character who can't love a child that isn't biologically his? So it's clear from the start that he's a heartless bastard, and evil scientist can't be too far behind that. Saw it coming a mile away, and the kids in the audience probably did too.
It's all some weird flimsy excuse to show the Addams Family traveling across the country, which I'll admit is a little clever if their final destination is Death Valley, that's a good one, but then stops in Miami and Niagara Falls feel very off-brand and unmotivated by the plot. Salem, MA would have been a good stop, but then the story decides they shouldn't go there. Huh? Why the heck not? Sleepy Hollow, NY - excellent choice. But Miami? There's nothing scary about Miami, except the fact that you have to drive through the garbage state of Florida to get there. San Antonio and the Grand Canyon feel like throwaway destinations, too - so in terms of having an interesting travel itinerary, the movie succeeds only with two of the six visited cities. New Orleans, with its connection to voodoo and ghost stories, would have been a better fit than Miami, for sure.
More NITPICK POINTS - who drags their kids on a family vacation because their kids are spending less time with them? Oh, right, every American parent, never mind. But who drives in a camper van that's shaped like their house, and only slightly smaller than that house? There could have been so many comedic opportunities with the family cramped into a tiny RV, or worse, a van or a station wagon. Then the trip would REALLY have been a nightmare. But a house-sized vehicle? Not funny. You might as well just put wheels on their spooky mansion and move that around from one travel destination to another. Anyway, they stole the "summer vacation" idea from "Hotel Transylvania 3", so, umm, it's been done.
I will note that there is a BIT of an attempted takedown of American culture - the Addams Family ends up in places like a kiddie teen pageant and a biker bar, and those are PRIME opportunities to make fun of a certain sort of Americans - the whole pageant culture deserves to be made fun of, with Moms turning their pre-teen daughters into overly made-up little sexpots with bouffant hairdos, and then of course the bikers with their denim outfits, tough attitudes and tricked-out cycles, it would be very easy to take the wind out of their sails, too, just make a couple of them look weak or effeminate and you're on to something. But the movie just doesn't GO THERE in either case, either because somebody didn't want to offend middle America, or because maybe it was just too easy? Either way, huge missed opportunities to poke fun at the culture.
One point, however, for Wednesday dropping buckets of blood, "Carrie"-style, on to her fellow pageant competitors. But the film should have gone even farther. The science fair pointed out how stupid it is to give out "participation trophies" and declare everyone winners, and of course the film gets this right, but then it should have kept up that tone and really become a satire on the stupidest parts of American culture.
Also starring the voices of Oscar Isaac (last seen in "Dune" (2021)). Charlize Theron (last seen in "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness"), Nick Kroll (last heard in "Sing 2"), Javon Walton, Bette Midler (last seen in "Wolfgang"), Conrad Vernon (last heard in "The Addams Family"), Snoop Dogg (last seen in "Jagged"), Bill Hader (last heard in "Lightyear"), Wallace Shawn (last seen in "Atlantic City"), Brian Sommer, Griffin Burns, Courtenay Taylor, Ted Evans, Cherami Leigh, Mary Faber,.
RATING: 4 out of 10 juggled babies (yeah, that's not a thing.)
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