It was the wrong call to age up Wednesday Addams

The success of a character like Wednesday Addams depends on a very precise comedic style that does not pair well with contemporary young adult tropes

Tim Burton has only ever told one story: the outsider misunderstood by the world. This lifelong obsession has sometimes given spectacular results (Beetlejuice, Batman 1 and 2, Big Fish), and, at other times, regrettable embarrassments (Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland). So every time he announces a new project, the gods of art play Russian roulette. His new Netflix series, Addams Family spinoff Wednesday, is, much like Burton himself, an acquired taste. Like all acquired tastes, it demands a willingness for masochism. Imagine a chronically sedated Sabrina Spellman shambling confusedly into the nonstop glitter fashion gala of Monster High and you'll get an idea of the fundamental problem with Wednesday. Some stories succeed at straddling tonal ambiguity; this one ties narrative tone to a rack and mercilessly turns the pulley until it snaps.

Expectations were always going to be unfairly high for this series. In the 1990s, Christina Ricci set the absolute platinum standard for the role without breaking a sweat. This new version has found a talented performer in Jenna Ortega, whose perfectly timed microexpressions reveal just the right hint of vulnerability behind Wednesday's mask of aloofness, but she's been given bland, repetitive lines that quickly get exhausting and put the comedy in the wrong place. We're supposed to be moved to laughter by Wednesday, not at her.

A character like Wednesday needs to be handled like Marvin the Paranoid Android: it's best enjoyed in moderation. The film version was an alarmingly jaded child whose brand of humor worked so well because it was the pinch of spice in a varied recipe. Here, as the main entry, it's indigestible, all the more so because this Wednesday is almost a grown-up, but her characterization didn't mature accordingly. The absurdist glee of watching a 10-year-old play with knives is broken when it's a 16-year old doing it. Suspension of disbelief is a rebellious bird, especially in fantasy, and a hundred times more when the fantasy is set in our world. The same lines that caused a blend of shock and delight when delivered in the innocent-sounding voice of a child cause annoyance when heard in a monotone from an edgy teen who discovered goth four decades late and made it her sole personality trait.

This misfire in characterization extends to Wednesday's choices, which invariably clash with her peers' attempts at contact. In the films, Wednesday was never surprised by her emotions. She was fully at home in her dark psyche. Sure, she was a sociopath, but she was self-aware enough to tell when loyalty mattered. Netflix Wednesday is a sociopath, period. She's so busy denying her emotions that she fails to notice she's controlled by them. She accuses those closest to her of outrageous acts of manipulation while engaging in Olympic-level manipulation herself. In her quest to solve a series of murders and, of course, prove everyone else wrong, she never realizes that her own inflated ego is the biggest obstacle.

Wednesday works better when it's a detective story than when it's an angsty soap opera, which is a pity, because the mystery ceases to be mysterious halfway through the season, and the teen drama is Riverdale levels of insufferable. The script relies on so many clichés that by the middle of the second episode the viewer has effectively received an accelerated course in snarky comebacks. It must be admitted that the writing quality improves considerably in the episodes not written by the Gough-Millar duo. (Why on Earth would you entrust this franchise to the creators of Smallville, who also happen to be the same guys who sincerely believed The Sword of Shannara could ever be adapted into something decent?) In particular, writer Kayla Alpert does an admirable job with her scripts for episodes 3 and 4. However, the show is generally more interested in aesthetic than substance.

John Scalzi has described this show as "Spooky Daria Goes to Gothwarts," and that would suffice as a review. However, it's important to delve into why Wednesday doesn't work. Let's make an effort to suspend disbelief and forget about the most blatantly broken parts. Let's forget for a moment that you can't hurt swimmers by dropping piranhas in the pool because chlorinated water gives fish blood poisoning. Let's forget that Nevermore Academy has so many special day events that basically no studying ever happens. Let's forget that the Nightshades super-hidden room loses all its aura of secrecy and becomes a regular hangout spot like the town cafeteria. Let's forget the extraordinarily offensive portrayal of mental illness. What, exactly, is missing in this formula?

The key to the humor of the Addams depends on the contrast between their weird customs and "respectable" society. The fact that the series presents a "Nancy Reagan High School," only to throw it away before the opening credits of the first episode, shows how much the creators missed the clear opportunity of showing Wednesday where she would stand out the most. Instead, they dilute her uniqueness by putting her in a whole school of monsters, but at the same time dilute the monsters because otherwise they'd outshine her. We're expected to just believe that the place houses hundreds of vampires, werewolves and assorted magical misfits, but we get to see almost none of that.

Another crime worth noting is the waste of such great actresses as Gwendoline Christie and Catherine Zeta-Jones. As the school headmistress, Christie looks adequately professional and in control, but the routine of the responsible adult exasperated by the meddling kid gets old very fast. For her part, Zeta-Jones is exquisite as always, but the character of Morticia is properly defined by a mischievous joie de vivre that is nowhere to be seen here. Mercifully, Christina Ricci is given a part worthy of her acting powers, and it's a treat to watch her channel Goldie Hawn in Death Becomes Her with such uncanny ease.

The problem with Wednesday is that it commits the cardinal sin of trying to be cool but obviously trying too hard. It's only saved by the murder mystery, which provides enough misdirections and credible suspects to maintain interest, but that is a plot that didn't have a reason to happen in the Addams world. The Addams Family requires a fine-tuned ear for dark comedy, an elusive lightning that has only struck twice. This attempt feels like yet another generic magical school filled with horny teenagers, with the aggravating factor that a severed hand manages to express more emotion than the protagonist's resting bored face. We're constantly told that this family likes macabre games, but in the end, the only one being tortured is the viewer.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10. Meh, good enough.

Bonuses: +1 for Danny Elfman and Chris Bacon's music, +1 for a well-designed murder mystery, +10 because it's always a joy to watch Catherine Zeta-Jones in anything.

Penalties: −1 for dull dialogue, −1 for wasting literal hundreds of monstrous characters we never see being monstrous, −1 because the makeup for Zeta-Jones is far too lazy, −10 because it's past time horror stories stopped taking so many liberties with mental illness.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10, and just barely.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

LET'S FRIGHTEN CHILDREN! Sleepers

Now that I've looked at some entries in the more mainstream family horror canon, I'd like to take a side-trip through the overgrown, ominous field alongside the road here to peek at some less-conventional but still easily accessible options for sharing frightening entertainment with kids.

By and large, I'm still thinking about this issue with young kids in mind. When I was growing up in the 80s, it was the era where even grocery stores had large VHS rental operations (and, with Redbox, we see all that is old is new again). Depending on the clerk at the counter, you could be 10 years old and rent any of the (as a friend of mine recently called it) unholy trinity of horror movies -- Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and any of their attendant sequels. So while I saw things like RoboCop or The Dead Zone at what was almost certainly too young an age, I don't think I'm any worse the wear for it. As a parent, you know your kids best and at a certain point, regardless of what the MPAA thinks, you're more than welcome to sit your tiny clone down on the couch and say, "Hey! Lemme show you something that scared the ever-loving shit out of me when I was your age!"

These are titles that kept popping up in my imagination as I thought about this series of posts, but that didn't conveniently fit in another post.

The Twilight Zone

Welcome to TGI McScratchy's, where it's constantly New Years Eve! Here we go again!

The Twilight Zone is on Netflix. Almost all of it. That means every day in your house can be New Year's Day, but even better, because you don't have to sit through the same three commercials on the SyFy Channel for however many hours you binge the show during their annual marathon. Something really fantastic happened in my house after I introduced the kids to Rod Serling's anthology masterpiece: the kids started asking me to tell them scary stories. But what they really wanted me to do was re-tell them the stories of the episodes. For a while there, I was really good at telling versions of And When the Sky was Opened, Mirror Image, Twenty-Two, and Little Girl Lost. The creepiness of so many of the episodes, from the uncanny to the paranoid to the unexplained, was a great way to introduce unsettling narratives into their media diet, and a lovely (for me) antidote to the Disney Channel. And the contained nature of each story makes them easily digested and easily understood. It was, and remains, a great thing to put on every now and again...if I can keep the kids from fighting about which episode to watch.

Animation

I spent a lot of time talking about animated features in the last installment of this series, but one of my favorite, favorite cartoons growing up was Disney's short The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I don't recall how I watched this so many times, separate from The Adventures of Mr. Toad — the two were originally presented back-to-back as a feature film — but I can only assume I taped the Ichabod Crane segment off the TV at some point and watched it repeatedly from that homemade VHS recording. I'm so pleased that this film is now part of my family's annual Halloween viewing programme. One of the neat things about it is that the whole thing is told in voice-over by Bing Crosby. There's very little diagetic sound in the segment, apart from the Headless Horseman's laughter and some sound effects.

The same decade that The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was produced, the Disney Animators Strike resulted in a whole bunch of animators heading out on their own to create their own studios. The most accomplished of these was almost unarguably UPA, which is now probably best remembered for Mr. Magoo. UPA was a titanic force for animation innovation and experimentation, and one of my favorite of their films is 1953's The Tell-Tale Heart, directed by Ted Parmelee. It's so creepy, and so wonderful.

And it's very difficult not to love a film that pulls all of the posts in this series together, which is Tim Burton's short film Vincent, about a little boy named Vincent who idolizes Poe, and which is narrated by Vincent Price. It's simply a joy.

 

The Best Ways to Ruin a Vacation

Here are a couple of good ways to ruin a vacation: 1) come to learn there's a man-eating shark in the water, or 2) decide that your new neighbors are serial killers. Either one of these scenarios will wreck a couple of weeks for you.

In the first case, I'm clearly talking about Jaws. This isn't a traditional horror movie, I guess, but it's the movie that gave us blockbusters, and it's been making people scared to go in the water since longer than I've been alive, so it's probably a slam-dunk crowd-pleaser for your home. The thing about Jaws, I think, that makes it such a great choice for young audiences is that even though there are frightening sequences, it's such a propulsive adventure tale that it's hard to not get caught up and just fall in love with the ride, even if parts of it scare you.

When it comes to Joe Dante's The 'burbs, it's a similar equation with different variables. It's tough to be too scared when you're laughing, and who's going to thumb their nose at a David S. Pumpkins/Princess Leia team up? In this comedy-horror that doesn't show up on nearly enough listicles these days, Tom Hanks' Ray decides to do a staycation during the same week his idiotic neighbor friends Art and ex-soldier Rumsfeld decide that the Klopek family, who just moved in to the cul-de-sac, are a bunch of murderous psychopaths. While there is plenty of gentle satire about suburban America and fan service to some lesser-known horror titles, the bottom line is this movie makes me laugh a lot, while sitting in a sandbox full of horror movie toys. If it's been a while since you've seen this one, give it another look, and see if it might be a good way to get your kids to laugh at some familiar horror tropes.

But Then, There's No Place Like Home

Finally, I have to mention one of my favorite-ever movies, and another title that I watched until the iron oxide started falling off the homemade VHS recording: The Wizard of Oz. They used to show this movie every Easter on network TV (Easter? Why? Network TV? I didn't have cable.) and one year I taped it, Maxwell House commercials and all, so I could watch it over and over and over and over again. The only other thing I'll say about this movie is that the flying monkeys have traumatized every generation of Americans for the last 80 years, so why shouldn't they traumatize your kids, too?


Recommendations

The Twilight Zone
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
The Tell-Tale Heart
Vincent
Jaws
The 'burbs
The Wizard of Oz
Ghostbusters

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather since 2012, Wizard of Oz devotee since...well, for much, much longer.

LET'S FRIGHTEN CHILDREN! The Mainstream

When I saw Coraline in the theater, I thought, “Nope nope nope. This is way too scary for kids.” I loved it, but the movie was legitimately unnerving. Buttons for eyes, sewn-up mouths, dead kids, a spider-lady. But then I heard an interview with Neil Gaiman where he was asked basically the same question — why did you write such a scary thing for kids? His response was wonderful (I mean...Neil Gaiman), and it was that things that are scary to adults are not the same things that are scary to children.

I think about this a lot, and try to take it into account when thinking about what to show my own kids. At the bottom of it all, the way I understand Gaiman’s meaning is that what’s *truly* frightening is the notion that the world ultimately doesn’t make any sense and isn’t governed by any rules that can be understood. As a kid, you’re always finding yourself in trouble or with aggrieved parents for reasons you don’t understand. The great hope is that one day the world will make more sense, and the feeling of careening between invisible, unfair obstacles will lessen.

It's a lovely fantasy. We don’t want to burst their bubble too soon. There is a pervasive mindset that runs throughout much of horror, which is that evil is omnipresent, its application is essentially random, and it is unstoppable. This is a universal feeling and one that older audiences are generally forced to reckon with beyond the confines of movies. One of the great gifts of horror stories to audience members is these tales allow the listener/watcher to confront their very real fears of an impersonal, uncaring, and brutal world in a safe environment. But for kids, the concerns are not yet of that nature. They are personal, dealing largely with one's place in the world. And these fears, too, are more-or-less universal.

The good news is that there are a ton of films that address these fears in a family-friendly way. And by and large, they’re the films you’re probably already familiar with.

Stranger Things

This is probably more of a no-brainer today than I give it credit for. I had some mixed feelings about showing my kid the breakout pop-horror title of our moment, but then I got the, "EVERYBODY at school has seen all three seasons and I'm getting SERIOUS spoilers" treatment, so now we're plowing through.

After Stranger Things, Season 1, I weighed in on this site about what I thought was a bizarre co-opting of...well, pretty much all the other titles I'm going to mention in this series. But here we are, two seasons later, and if kids today don't have time to read/watch every single thing me and the Duffer Brothers read and watched a million years ago, well, who can blame them? If Stranger Things is what steps into the breech, I can think of far worse things.

Tim Burton and LAIKA

At some point, everyone feels alone. Everyone feels like an outsider, or an imposter. Everyone feels un-understandable. This makes sense -- we each experience the world discretely from within our own literal shell. We are unique, separate beings, and each of us experiences the world in a singular way. It's scary. When you get right down to it, it's terrifying. It's only through shared experience and through story that we begin to recognize our own experiences in the experiences of others. Many of us are lucky in that we overlap in many ways with those around us, and begin to recognize these shared impressions almost before we are conscious of them. I guess this is what's called "fitting in." But some of us take a long, long time to encounter another or others who make us feel like we're not the first ones to fight these particular battles.

Artists are generally outsiders. Otherwise, we'd all be businesspeople. Growing up, we're often bullied or shunned. The weird kid. The oddball. The quiet one. Like Tim Burton, who famously idolized Vincent Price as a child and struggled to fit in, yet grew up to put a stamp of weirdness across the whole of popular culture that continues to invite other oddballs to feel ok about standing out. As a creator under the ubiquitous Disney umbrella, it's probably easy these days to shrug off Tim Burton. But I don't. This is, after all, the man who directed Ed Wood. He's more than earned his place on my Mount Rushmore.

The first two horror-adjacent films that my kids loved and re-watched again and again at a very young age were The Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands. But there's a funny thing about the movie that is billed as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas — Burton neither wrote nor directed it. Henry Selick directed and Caroline Thompson wrote the script. Now, Caroline Thompson's a helluva writer. She also wrote Edward Scissorhands, and The Addams Family, and The Corpse Bride, among many other titles in her 30-year-and-still-going career.

Henry Selick later moved to LAIKA and directed their first feature film, Coraline. You're sensing a pattern, I know. ParaNorman was the studio's second feature film, and is, to me, an indispensable family horror film. There is a lot of very dark thematic material in it, particularly when we learn about Agatha's backstory, but that character, like the rest of the film, is handled so empathetically and with so much care that I never hesitate to recommend the movie. Plus, the zombies are no scarier than Scooby-Doo villains, and are often played for laughs.

I mentioned how the film treats Agatha with empathy. This is a common thread in so many of these films. Norman himself is an outsider, someone who is misunderstood both at home and at school. Like Edward Scissorhands. Coraline is ignored, and feels invisible. And Jack Skellington is someone who seems cool and the guy everybody else wants to be like...but he feels out-of-place and like something's missing. For kids (and, let's be honest, most adults), these films model a way of existing in the world that resists being governed by the fear of not fitting in, encourages being open and welcoming to others who may be different, and highlights the fundamental human connections that bind us.

These are powerful messages, and they run counter to so, so many of the messages that kids receive on a daily basis.

If we can encourage our own little weirdos to be themselves and support each other, and we can do it with ghosts and spider-ladies, isn't it kind of incumbent on us to do so?

Recommendations

For kids, I recommend:
The Nightmare Before Christmas
Edward Scissorhands
Coraline
ParaNorman
Stranger Things

And though I haven't seen them, I have had good friends with kids recommend the more recent:
Goosebumps
The House with a Clock in its Walls

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of  Nerds of a Feather since 2012. Emmy-winning producer and director, and lifelong horror geek.

SIDE QUESTS: The Theremin!

SIDE QUESTS is an occasional essay series where we explore some of the other stuff we geek out about. A nerd cannot live on but sci-fi and fantasy alone...though it's certainly fun to try.

What Are We Talking About?

Today, we're talking about the theremin — an electronic instrument invented in the 1920s, that became the sound of science fiction in the 1950s, and which a performer plays without actually touching. It is way hard to play (believe me, I try), and when successfully done, it appears to be accomplished by magic. The theremin is a wonderful, inexplicable oddity, and if someone ever described me in similar terms, I could die happy. This may be part of my attraction to the instrument.

The Basics

You've heard a theremin, or at least something that is intended to fool you into thinking it's a theremin (but is likely some kind of synth that is actually comprehensible to mortals without perfect pitch). Basically, the theremin is a box with an antenna sticking up out of one side, and a second, looped antenna sticking out of the opposite side. The one sticking up controls the pitch, the loop controls the volume, and you literally wave your hands in the air to make it work.

Leon Theremin patented the instrument in 1928, and in 1950, Bernard Herrmann used it to score the film The Day the Earth Stood Still. It had been used in other prominent films before then, including Hitchcock's Spellbound, but after The Day the Earth Stood Still, the instrument and its ethereal sound seemed to become a hallmark of the sci-fi genre. Forbidden Planet, for instance, doesn't use a theremin in the score, but it sure sounds like one. The sound became so iconic and so identified with genre movies that in 1994, it was the focal point of Howard Shore's score for Ed Wood, which is one of my all-time favorite movies. The performer on that score was Lydia Kavina, who learned the instrument from Theremin himself. How cool is that??

The Rabbit Hole

I've been fascinated with the theremin since I saw one played in a music store while I was in college. It's only been in the last couple of years that I considered trying to obtain one, and I finally did so at the end of 2017. How to learn to play this crazy thing except via YouTube? And what better for plunging down fathomless rabbit holes than...well, YouTube?

My "teacher" has been Carolina Eyck, who, as it happens, learned the instrument from Lydia Kavina, who learned it from Leon Theremin. I mean, I'm to the point where I can play "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" right about half the time. Maybe almost half. These women can play Rachmaninoff. It is mesmerizing to watch. So I watched a lot of theremin videos.

But then.

But then I discovered that "playing Ennio Morricone on theremin" is a thing. Spaghetti Western music played on a magic sci-fi box? Friends, I was lost. My nerd heart was enraptured. Enjoy!

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012, multi-instrumentalist, Emmy-winning producer, and all-around rabbit hole dweller.

Microreview [film]: The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr.

In which we see that Ed Wood's story is better than...well...any of Ed Wood's stories

I'm on record as saying I think Ed Wood is probably the best movie ever made about making movies. It came out in 1994, and a year later, apparently to capitalize on the sudden name recognition generated by the Tim Burton movie, the independently-produced documentary version of the same events came out. It is very odd, but also very touching.

If you are not familiar with the events of Ed Wood, it's going to be hard for me to summarize what this documentary's about, but I'll give it a go. Edward D. Wood, Jr. was a World War II veteran who moved to Los Angeles after the war to try to get into the picture business. When the story of Christine Jorgensen — one of the first Americans to openly undergo gender-reassignment surgery — hit the news, Ed Wood managed to land the job of directing an exploitation picture called, I Changed My Sex. Ed landed the job because he was secretly a transvestite, which he revealed to the film's producer. After promising to shoot the movie in three days, Ed wrote a script about the life he was leading, keeping his transvestism secret from his girlfriend Dolores Fuller. Dolores would go on to write hit songs for Elvis Presley and Nat King Cole. The resulting movie, ultimately released as Glen or Glenda? is one of the most incomprehensible things ever set to film. And it stars Bela Lugosi. Ed and Bela met somehow, I guess there are a couple different versions of what went down, and became...probably...friends. Bela hadn't worked in a while, and needed money. Ed would keep Bela employed until Bela's death, and I kid you not, beyond. The three films they made together are widely thought of as some of the worst movies ever made. Also appearing in them are Tor Johnson, a Swedish professional wrestler, Vampira, an out-of-work late-night horror TV host who was the inspiration for Disney's Maleficent and, later, Elvira, and a group of friends, some actors, chiropractors, girlfriends, investors' kids, and whoever else would be in them for nothing. Ed's "masterpiece," which was finished after Bela died, was actually financed by a Baptist church in Beverly Hills, and Ed got the cast and crew to agree to be baptized as a condition of financing.

Phew. Ok, so all that is in Ed Wood, and familiar to anybody who's seen it. But it is remarkable to hear the people who were actually involved tell the story. The filmmakers got EVERYBODY. They got Bela's only son, they got Dolores, and the woman who stole Dolores' part in Bride of the Monster because of a misunderstanding about her investing in the production, they got Ed's ex-wife and step-son, they got surviving members of Ed's casts and crews, they got Maila Nurmi (Vampira), they even got the pastor of the Baptist church that paid for Plan 9 from Outer Space. And things you think, "Well, that probably didn't happen like that," while watching Tim Burton's movie, you find out, no, it pretty much happened like that.

Ed's story was not a happy one, though. He died a homeless alcoholic at the age of 54. While not lingering on it, the movie doesn't skip over Ed's last years, in which he was usually drunk and making pornographic films. Similarly, Ed's relationship with Lugosi has been the subject of a lot of speculation and some recrimination. Was Ed a heartless, exploitative fraud who ruined Bela Lugosi's legacy (a position held by Bela Lugosi, Jr.), or were they actually friends? Did Ed give something to Bela in the legendary but then-forgotten actor's final years that Bela cherished? To hear Ed's stepson recount visits to Lugosi's house, for instance, you might be inclined to think that, yeah, the two were odd but close friends. As the film ends, and each of the interviewees signs off on their final memories of the actual man — not the character named "The Worst Director of All Time," but the actual human being that they knew for better and worse — the movie is profoundly touching. To hear these people express their regrets for not understanding Ed's cross-dressing at the time, for not being there when they felt he may have needed them most, or for some, how much it meant to them that they were with him right to the end...it's moving stuff.

Ed Wood was not a good filmmaker. But he was loved, and he was complicated and frustrating and misunderstood, and when he was gone, he was missed. And for all of its complexity and murkiness, I think his story is a meaningful one, and I'm glad we have it.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for getting all the interviewees they got; +1 for an unexpectedly evocative emotional experience; +1 for being quite frank about topics that were emotionally perilous for some of the people on camera; and +1 for Maila Nurmi's sorry-not-sorry admission that Orson Welles gave her an STD

Penalties: -1 for a little bit of narrative unevenness in terms of who-did-what-when; -1 for being mostly talking heads, but what are you gonna do?

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10. I feel like this is a must for fans of Wood, but also a good watch for anybody invested in independent or cult filmmaking

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather since 2012. For reviews of other documentaries about cult film figures, check out Corman's World and Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story.