English is not language enough to contain their emotions. Raul Julia and Anjelica Huston are given a lot of one-liners and payoff gags, of course, but what's funny is the stuff that comes in between - the real affection with which they embrace each other, and the way they delight in their unspeakable lifestyle. What is most beguiling about 'Addams Family Values' is the way the relationship between Gomez and Morticia has ripened. Then Wednesday meets her first boyfriend, and there is little doubt they were, alas, made for one another. In an attempt to get the older children out of her hair, she convinces Morticia and Gomez to send them to summer camp, where they do not, needless to say, fit right in. After all, he is one of the richest men in the world, in addition to being probably the ugliest. She's not worried: 'I'm good with my hands.' Debbie is revealed to have sinister designs on poor Fester ( Christopher Lloyd), the long-lost Addams brother whose reappearance provided most of the story in the 1991 film. Nothing in the household seems to bother her, not even the unexpected arrival of Thing, a disembodied hand that leaps onto her shoulder. The services of a nanny are clearly required, and the family hires Debbie Jelinsky ( Joan Cusack), who arrives in a low-cut uniform, and takes charge. The pre-existing Addams children, Wednesday and Pugsley, are insanely jealous, and even try to arrange the baby's decapitation on the guillotine that is conveniently in the basement. 'Take them out of the baby's mouth!' Morticia exclaims. 'He has my father's eyes,' Gomez murmurs. The little newcomer, named Pubert, sure does take after his dad.

'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.

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