Kooky, mysterious, and spooky? You bet. Creepy and all together ooky? No way.

The big-screen members of "The Addams Family" are so passionate, zealous, and downright carnal about things grim that it's impossible to find them particularly monstrous. Like the 60s television series that inspired this film, these characters are more fun and multi-dimensional than the one-joke ghouls of creator Charles Addams' long-running cartoon in the New Yorker. Gomez (Raul Julia), wife Morticia (Anjelica Huston), their kids and sundry relations all heartily enjoy a good meal -- even if it's still moving on their plates. The children, Wednesday (Christina Ricci) and Pugsley (Jimmy Workman), are ordinary scamps who like to roughhouse -- with meat cleavers and electric chairs. Romantics Gomez and Morticia share a love of Brontean proportions that will go on beyond the grave -- in fact, much of their endless wooing occurs next to graves.

"The Addams Family" is best enjoyed as a series of separate gags, individual comic panels each with a stagey set-up and punch line. Taken together, they give a satisfying glimpse at life inside the family's weathered mansion, from butler Lurch's (Carel Struyken) early-morning poisoning of house plants to Granny's (Judith Malina) dinner preparation, blending instructions from a famous cookbook and an even more famous text for pathologists. Like Tim Burton's "Beetlejuice," these scenes have a consistent weirdness that feels right for an early-90s audience, an audience accustomed to the whole cloth worlds of Spielberg's generation of fantasy filmmakers.

But "The Addams Family"'s roots are in an era of American television that was less concerned about self-contained worlds than of poking fun at the whitebread nuclear family represented in tv sitcoms. The bottom line joke in the series was that the Addams were a real family, but they weren't what other people considered typical. Outsiders would invariably come to the house, get bug-eyed, then run away in a panic. Wholesomely unwholesome differences prevailed over homogenization of an American neighborhood. But this was a joke for the early 60s. Its lingering influence on the new film -- the need to involve outsiders -- is often jarring, compromising the rest of the film's more contemporary flavor of unadulterated nuttiness.

There is, for instance, an imposed plot concerning a conspiracy between the Addams' lawyer (Dan Hedaya) and an evil woman (Elizabeth Wilson) who have designs on the family's fortune. The woman's adopted son (Christopher Lloyd) infiltrates the Addams by claiming to be the long-lost Uncle Fester, who is legal heir to the estate. The amount of time it takes to get this plan underway becomes tedious and frustrating -- one really would rather be touring the cemetery with Morticia. And there is a strange moment in which a gathering of normal socialites come to the house for a charity function, but register nothing of discomfort or amazement at what they see.

Elsewhere, however, there are more successful comic bits about people's reactions to the family, particularly at a school play in which Wednesday and Pugsley, performing their interpretation of a scene from Shakespeare, shock parents into stunned silence. But the richest material for laughs in "The Addams Family" comes from simply watching the family in its everday environment. Director Barry Sonnenfeld, an experienced cinematographer who has contributed a certain high-velocity whooosh to movies like "Raising Arizona" and "Miller's Crossing," brings that same visual rush to this film. Sonnenfeld makes a fantastic spectacle of Gomez' swordplay and of the scamperings of disembodied hand Thing as he races, dog-like, down halls and through streets. Where Sonnenfeld could use a little more imagination -- a gathering of the entire, extended Addams clan becomes a missed opportunity for makeup, costumes, and special effects -- he does know how to catch actor Julia's' genuine swagger and Huston's vamping eroticism while keeping them both funny.

If the film has a problem with consistency of tone, it holds nothing back of satire and good-natured wickedness. The Addams may not be the sunniest family around, but they are a portrait of a tight-knit, proud, and loving family. And they may be, judging by the schedule of about-to-be- released films for the holiday season, the only such family we'll see in the movies this Christmas.To add your cents to this movie Pages by Film.com/Point of Presence Company.