Anjelica Huston, Raul Julia, Christopher Lloyd, and a scene-stealing young Christina Ricci made the Addams mansion one of the best places to visit in 1991. Thirty-five years later, the classic comedy is ready for another family reunion on Tubi.
Watch NowThirty-five years after The Addams Family brought Charles Addams' wonderfully macabre clan back to the screen, the movie still feels like the kind of family reunion we'd happily crash. Long-lost Uncle Fester has apparently returned after 25 years away, Gomez is ecstatic to have his brother home, and Morticia is preparing the sort of celebration where “wake the dead” isn't necessarily a figure of speech. Wednesday, naturally, is suspicious. She has a point.
Director Barry Sonnenfeld fills the movie with cobwebs, secret passages, graveyards, sword fights, and a family that finds everyone else's definition of “normal” considerably stranger than their own. It's exactly the kind of macabre fun that feels at home in Tubi’s Halloween Treats collection, where spooky season doesn't necessarily require losing sleep afterward. But the Addamses themselves are the reason we're still invited back. Gomez and Morticia are wildly in love. The kids are encouraged to be exactly as bizarre as they please. Fester is welcomed home without anybody asking him to tone things down. The family's staying power also earned them a spot in our family franchise marathon, with the original series and Addams Family Values waiting when one trip to the mansion inevitably becomes several.
Underneath all the darkness, they're weirdly one of cinema's healthiest families.
Huston gives Morticia an elegance so effortless that gliding through a candlelit mansion in a floor-length black dress somehow looks practical. Her wonderfully dry delivery keeps Morticia composed through nearly every absurdity, while the warmth underneath it makes her devotion to Gomez and the family feel every bit as genuine as her enthusiasm for the macabre.
Julia plays Gomez at approximately 200% enthusiasm at all times, whether he's fencing, celebrating Fester's return, or becoming completely distracted by his wife. Julia makes that enormous energy infectious rather than exhausting, giving Gomez a romantic, excitable sweetness that turns the Addams patriarch into the happiest person in basically every room he enters.
Lloyd's Fester has an awkward physicality and childlike vulnerability that make him feel slightly out of step even inside the Addams household. He can be strange, suspicious, and deeply funny without losing the emotional pull of a man trying to understand where he belongs, which gives the movie's central mystery more heart than its con-game setup initially suggests.
Ricci barely needs to change her expression to make Wednesday the most intimidating child in the room. Her deadpan delivery turns threats, observations, and deeply questionable sibling activities into perfectly reasonable conversation, establishing a version of Wednesday whose complete lack of interest in behaving like a normal kid became part of the character's screen legacy.
“Welcome to the reunion, where ordinary was never invited.”
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