Black comedy for kids, specifically those too young to remember the mid-Sixties television sitcom of the same name. The pattern of inversions is simple to grasp -- the bouquet of rose stems with the blossoms snipped off, the children holding a TV antenna outdoors in a lightning storm -- and then it just goes on repeating itself (inside a dormant long-lost-brother plot). This sort of thing comes more welcome at intervals of one cartoon per issue of The New Yorker than at twenty-four frames per second. Cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld (Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing), making his debut as a director, puts the cameraman (Owen Roizman) through his paces, especially when trying to keep up with the peregrinations of a severed hand called Thing; but the production design (Richard MacDonald) is hard to appreciate amid the monotonous darkness. Raul Julia, Anjelica Huston, Christopher Lloyd. (1991) — Duncan Shepherd
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