As if the Addams’ weren’t creepy enough, along comes Deepfake to raise the bar a little further. This is one that despite being well done I might actually say is kind of less than appealing, but at the same time hilarious since honestly you can’t resist Ron Swanson. So yes, I’m torn on this matter since to be fair I happen to like Wednesday Addams since she was the perfect blend of dispassionate and psychotic that made her character so awesome, but Ron Swanson’s constant scowl was always hard to resist as well. But putting the two together is kind of an unholy combination that was nothing short of great and horrible at the same time, the kind of thing you almost feel guilty for liking but just can’t bring yourself to care about since it satisfies some hard to describe need to laugh at something that might be awful but also awfully good.
There’s just something so disturbing about the Addams’ that one can’t help but love the fact that they’re so twisted and think of it as normal. Wednesday is without a doubt the child that embraces her heritage fully and without reservation. You could say that Pugsley does the same, but he does it in such a different way that it almost seems more upbeat, like his father Gomez. Wednesday is the more dour sibling that embraces the dark nature of her family and really seems like the true psycho of the bunch. In a way she looks like someone that might be contemplating just how many different ways she can kill you and make it look as though you simply disappeared. On the other hand Ron Swanson’s constant scowl is just unnerving for some and thus placing his face on the body of a young girl, disturbing to say the least, is still enough to send those with a dark sense of humor into fits of laughter since it’s a pleasant distraction from the otherwise stuffy and overdone notion of the valley girls and popular guys that seek to dominate this portion of the movie. Plus, hearing Wednesday’s quips in the modulated voice of Ron Swanson is still great enough that you just have to laugh since if he was really speaking the lines it’d be even better, as Swanson’s delivery is just as deadpan as Wednesday’s ever was.
This second movie wasn’t nearly as well received as it kind of tanked and didn’t get a whole lot of credit given that it deviated a bit from the point of the first movie. But if you recall, the first movie was mostly about Fester and bringing him back to the family, whereas the second movie focused heavily on the kids and gave Wednesday a bigger role as Pugsley, as usual, followed in her wake. The whole story of Fester getting married and dominated by his wife since he was a lonely kind of fell by the wayside, while Gomez and Morticia, who were great in the first one, had limited screen time in this picture. That was kind of regrettable but really it’s not hard to figure since this was an attempt to showcase the kids a little more and move away from the adults. The moments with Fester were funny but this family is usually most effective when they’re all together as it’s been seen, and splitting them up was a good attempt to show their individual traits, but it didn’t come off as a workable idea. One thing you can say about Wednesday however is that she was able to hold her own for a good while before she decided to go with the flow. And even that didn’t last for long since she and the rest of the rejects at the camp took over the final act when they sabotaged the Thanksgiving day play that the two camp coordinators had the kids perform.
It was dark, it was twisted, and as an adult there are a lot of things to pick out that were just inherently wrong with the movie, but still you can’t help but think that it was pretty funny overall. Obviously it didn’t have the same zing as the first movie and wasn’t going to be just as good, but it still didn’t fully disappoint since it brought back all but one of the original cast, and to be honest the grandmother was funny, but she wasn’t a vital component to the group. Had they switched out anyone else it might have gone so much worse and would have been easily ignored. As it stands however this was still a funny movie given that they kept things more or less the same and had the Addams’ interact on a larger scale with the world outside their domain. Plus, between Swanson and Wednesday you can’t help but think that the deadpan delivery is just haunting.
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