A prediction: The decor to beat this year will be Creepy Kooky Chic. That's the look of Addams Family Values (the sequel to the 1991 smash), which opens in November. The big challenge, laughs Ken Adam, the film's production designer, has been ''to make sure the sets aren't too beautiful.''
Adam, 72, an Oscar-winning art director whose work includes 1975's Barry Lyndon and six of the James Bond movies, had only seven hectic weeks to build seven full soundstages with more than a dozen different sets for the Addams mansion alone.
For inspiration, he went right to the source: the cartoons of the late Charles Addams (1912-1988). ''I didn't like the look of the first movie because I felt it didn't follow him,'' Adam sniffs. ''The house became Art Nouveau rather than Second Empire.'' Sticking to the original drawings when he could- Charles Addams buffs will recognize several cemetery statues in the photographs at left, for example-Adam inclined walls and raised doorways, windows, and ceilings far above regular proportions to create an outsize, funhouse-style perspective. He also used the walls of the house to suggest movement, frescoing to add texture and putting up the wallpaper freehand to make it appear irregular. ''The house,'' Adam says with pride, ''looks alive but aged.''
But not half as alive as the restaurant where Morticia and Gomez tango, a grotto with live moss hanging from dank-looking walls. ''The French bistro had to be grotesque in a way, because taking such a strange family outside of their environment doesn't really work otherwise,'' Adam explains. ''You had to believe they'd go there often.'' The result is the ultimate in lush morbidity: Complete with black chairs, gilt glasses, a string quartet, and red-washed cave walls -- all eerily aglow with candlelight-the underground restaurant is, well, to die for.
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