The latest Adams Family joint harks back thematically to Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture and the Coen Brothers’ Fargo. It’s also roughly in the wheelhouse of the weird Christian Left Behind horror/soap movies, which take the Book of Revelations literally in such a way that all manner of contortions are necessary to avoid the pretty much inevitable conclusion that if Saint John was serious about the Last Trump (not a comfortable term just now) then his God is some sort of malicious sociopath. Here, there’s almost a theological debate between Sheriff Deb McCloud (Toby Poser) and her once-wild hippie chick now born-again mother (Judith Roberts) which is disturbing because of the Christian’s all-too-credible vindictiveness against a woman she abandoned when she was in her selfish hedonist phase and now wants to browbeat and lecture since she’s been ‘saved’ … only, after a Rapture, grandmother is still on Earth, unlike the animals and judged-as-spotless souls who’ve disappeared.
The film opens with Deb hoping for a quiet day off only to be dragged out of bed by her deputy Mikey (Zelda Adams) because the power is out, the phone lines are down, the water is off (blood trickles out of a tap) and there have been a rash of missing persons cases. If Deb can’t have a day off, she’s hoping for a cup of hot coffee – which proves unobtainable in this snowy, fractious nowhere. All manner of bizarre phenomena are taking place – bloody meaty fissures in the snow like ‘giant red assholes’ are sprouting up, the embalmed dead return to life, strange creatures which seem to be made of sewn-together baby skins pop up and vanish in the woods, and a vigilante posse get out their guns and put up a roadblock because they think this is another ‘virus’ and don’t want to go through Covid again. Even looking at the Left Behind films, it’s hard not to think they are more about politics than religion – and The Glorious Dead is insightful about the way Americans in 2026 seem forever ready to turn on each other over real or imagined resentments. Perhaps the most significant scene has the Sheriff – theoretically the embodiment of conservative law and order values who ought to be respected by a rural community – hauled out of her car and repeatedly punched in the face by a militant whose reaction to an inexplicable situation is just to want to hit someone and not stop hitting them.
Each Adams Family film has a different creative line-up – this was directed by Poser and John Adams, who also take a lead and minor roles as widow and zombie husband, with Zelda Adams photographing and writing the score (performed by the family band H6llB6nd6r) and Lulu Adams playing multiple roles. Each Adams film is also differently paced and scaled and looks at family or society from a different angle, though they’re also checking off different types of horror and fantasy. One of the pleasures of their works is that they’re proudly small-scaled, handmade, economical (this has a tight 80 minute running time, but doesn’t feel at all rushed), textured in a way you only get when the directors are also sourcing props, cadging favours and painting sets. Again, we get imaginative, unusual effects – the meat creatures are uniquely bizarre creations. Francis Ford Coppola, in the midst of something as big as Finian’s Rainbow or Apocalypse Now, once said his whole film career was an attempt to get back to the kind of elation he felt putting on a play in college; I get the impression that the Adams Family make films the way Coppola wanted to.