Plot
Gomez (Raúl Juliá) and Morticia Addams (Anjelica Huston) welcome the birth of their third child, Pubert (Kaitlyn and Kristen Hooper). Older siblings Wednesday (Christina Ricci) and Pugsley (Jimmy Workman) are antagonistic toward their new baby brother and attempt to kill him several times, but Pubert fortuitously survives each attempt. Worried by this behavior, Gomez and Morticia seek out a nanny to help look after the children. After Wednesday and Pugsley scare off the first few applicants, Debbie Jelinsky (Joan Cusack) is hired. Gomez's brother Fester (Christopher Lloyd) is immediately infatuated with her. Unbeknownst to the family, Debbie is a serial killer known as "The Black Widow", who seeks out wealthy bachelors, marries them and then murders them on their wedding night, making the deaths appear accidental so that she inherits their fortunes.
Wednesday and Pugsley become suspicious of Debbie's intentions toward Fester, believing that she is after his vast riches. Debbie tricks Gomez and Morticia into sending the children away to a summer camp, where they quickly make enemies of the perky camp owners Gary (Peter MacNicol) and Becky Granger (Christine Baranski) and the snobby Amanda Buckman (Mercedes McNab). Joel Glicker (David Krumholtz), another social outcast, develops a crush on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Debbie advances her plot to seduce Fester: she professes to love him, but claims to be a virgin and says they cannot consummate their relationship until marriage, prompting Fester to propose. Wednesday and Pugsley are distraught at the news and try to escape from camp, while Gary and Becky repeatedly attempt to get them to be peppy. They are allowed to attend the wedding, and Wednesday brings Joel along.
On their honeymoon, Debbie attempts to electrocute Fester by dropping a radio into the bathtub with him, but he is unaffected. Frustrated by his resilience, Debbie uses her sexual hold over Fester to manipulate him into severing all ties with his family. The two move into a lavish mansion, and when Gomez, Morticia, Grandmama (Carol Kane) and butler Lurch (Carel Struycken) attempt to visit, Debbie forbids them from seeing Fester. Pubert soon goes through dramatic changes, becoming blonde-haired, rosy-cheeked and cheerful. Grandmama determines that he is possessed, a condition brought on by anxiety over Fester's separation from the family.
Back at camp, Wednesday refuses to participate in Gary's play, a musical production of the first Thanksgiving. She, Pugsley, and Joel are locked in the "Harmony Hut" and forced to watch upbeat family films to curb their antisocial behavior. On emerging from the hut, Wednesday feigns perkiness and agrees to play the role of Pocahontas. However, during the play, she leads the other social outcasts — who have all been cast as Native Americans — in a revolt, capturing Gary, Becky and Amanda and leaving the camp in chaos. Before she leaves, Wednesday and Joel kiss.
Debbie tries once again to kill Fester, this time by blowing up their mansion with a bomb. When he again survives, she pulls a gun on him and admits that she never loved him. Thing — the Addams' animated, disembodied hand — helps him to escape. Fester, Wednesday and Pugsley arrive at the Addams mansion, but the family's reunion is interrupted by Debbie who straps them — with the exception of Pubert — into electric chairs and forces them to watch a slide show detailing how she murdered her parents and previous husbands. Pubert, having returned to normal, is propelled into the room via a chain reaction of events and manipulates the wires just as Debbie throws the switch, causing her to be incinerated while the rest of the family is spared.
At Pubert's first birthday party, Uncle Fester becomes enamored with Cousin Itt's child's new nanny, Dementia. Wednesday and Joel visit Debbie's grave in the family cemetery; Wednesday says that if she wanted to kill her husband, she would simply scare him to death. As Joel lays flowers on the grave, a hand shoots up from the ground and grabs him while Wednesday gives a satisfied smirk.
Read more about this topic: Addams Family Values
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
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—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)