Somewhere between the campy humor of the black-and-white 1960s sitcom and the bland, lowbrow cartoon version of the Age of COVID, the Addams Family had its moment of glory in the theatrical adaptation starring Anjelica Huston and the late Raul Julia as Morticia and Gomez Addams.

The Addams Family (1991) succeeded in part because of the strength of its cast. But it also rose above its peers by borrowing so many macabre visual cues and dialogue from the original Charles Addams cartoons (as well as a few notable references to the TV series starring John Astin and Carolyn Jones).

The movie brings this home even before the opening credits, with a delightfully ooky scene straight from the comics, with joyful Christmas carolers at the door and the Addams Family on the ramparts above, preparing to dump their cauldron of boiling oil. But keep watching, and you'll see more scenes recreated verbatim from the source material.

The humor throughout the movie is pitch-perfect, as anyone who's read the original Addams cartoons can attest.

The story itself is fairly mundane, serving primarily as a frame for the classic Addams Family brand of gallows humor. In the film, Gomez and Morticia live happily enough in their rambling mansion with their children Wednesday (Christina Ricci) and Pugsley (Jimmy Workman), Grandmama (Judith Malina), manservant Lurch (Carel Struycken) and sentient hand Thing (Christopher Hart), but Gomez mourns the loss of his brother Fester, missing 25 years since a falling out over a romantic entanglement with the conjoined Amor twins.

The Addams' greedy lawyer Tully Alford (Dan Hedaya) conspires with loan shark Abigail Craven (Elizabeth Wilson) to pass her son Gordon (Christopher Lloyd) off as the missing Fester so they can steal the Addams family fortune, which resides in hidden vaults under the mansion. Gordon, however, begins to feel an unexpected connection to the family, who welcomes him (despite some suspicion) with open arms.

The movie is brilliantly funny, delightfully dark and slightly morbid, although the Addams style of humor has a casual menace that never feels mean-spirited. The heart of the family is, of course, the undying passion between Gomez and Morticia, and Julia and Huston hit all the right notes of ghoulish passion with exactly the right amount of chemistry between them. Ricci (who was just 11 when the movie came out) was an inspired choice to play the grimly hilarious girl Wednesday, and Lloyd is tons of fun as Gordon -- most especially as he tries to settle in with the Addams as the long-lost Fester.

The Addams Family is a winner on all counts, and it's a shame the studio only managed to crank out one sequel before Julia's untimely death from a stroke. According to interviews before Julia's passing, this role gave him immense pleasure, and it stands as a tribute to his acting chops -- as part of an amazing ensemble cast -- to this day.