

"Right now." In an inevitable twist on the usual movie childbirth scene, she's in agony in the delivery room - and loving every minute of it. "I'm going to have a baby," Morticia ( Anjelica Huston) tells Gomez ( Raul Julia).

"Addams Family Values" involves not one but three subplots, all of them funny and one of them (about the birth of a new baby boy) the source of one great sight gag after another. Maybe I liked it more than the original because I was in a different mood? Perhaps, knowing I was going to see twee little MacAulay Culkin in " The Nutcracker" right after seeing this film, I was in the mood for macabre bad taste? Or perhaps the screenplay, by Paul Rudnick, contains more invention than the 1991 effort. Nothing much seems to have changed the stars are about the same, the director is still Barry Sonnenfeld, the Addams mansion still towers above a blasted heath, next to a graveyard. It's the rare sequel that is better than its original, and yet "Addams Family Values" qualifies.
