The Munsters
In The Munsters, Rob Zombie trades trailer trash horror for cheeky fun. The Munsters may be one of the strangest cinematic passion projects of the last few years. Stripping away his usual violent edgelord tendencies, writer-director Rob Zombie has made a film that is explicit only in how family friendly it is—a departure that's sure to throw his fans for a loop. While this newfound tone doesn't count as a strike against the film's quality, it also doesn't do much to excuse Zombie's usual faults as a storyteller, namely in terms of narrative coherence. But as a love letter to the sitcom that so inspired Zombie as a child, The Munsters might be the most authentic-feeling television revival ever put on film, warts and all.
Rob Zombie's childhood was not unlike thousands of young Americans. Growing up in Haverhill, Massachusetts there wasn't much to do, so he'd watch TV like all the kids on his block. It is important always to remember that when thinking about the past in America as a very specific lived experience and not an abstract series of symbols and images that there really only were three channels on TV. Zombie likely saw “The Munsters,” a series that had been passed from hand to hand until finally it was written by “Rocky and Bullwinkle” creators Allan Burns and Chris Hayward, several times a week. “The Munsters” had been intended to be a kind of animated riff on “Leave it to Beaver” (whose producers were also running the show at “The Munsters”) with character designs borrowed from Universal's monster movies, so they wouldn't have to worry about rights issues, leading to a live-action sitcom on CBS. The Munster family would just try to get by week after week; deal with trifling problems like first dates or larger ones like intolerance, and like "The Brady Bunch" after them, have short-lived brushes with fame. When you grow up in Haverhill and there are but three TV channels, you will likely seen every single episode of “The Munsters” after school and this thing that was intended as a lark may indeed take on a greater importance than perhaps even its creators could have understood. Zombie discovered gore films when he was a teenager, but he never forgot “The Munsters.”
Rob Zombie's The Munsters reboot is a labor of enthusiastic love for the typically more violent, sickeningly grindhouse-forward horror filmmaker. Show The Munsters to unknowing audiences without the writer and director's name attached, and not a single patron would connect the hellbilly superbeast with such a tender, slapstick, made-for-television nostalgia blanket stitched from patches of CBS' not-so-terrifying 1960s sitcom. Zombie ditches psycho-sexual depravity, doesn't turn bodies into grotesque trophies, and certainly skips any harsh language. The Munsters isn't even a “contemporary” take on dustier material — Zombie makes the old-school Munsters feature he's chased for decades (Munsters references in Zombie's music are as easy as “Dragula”), and it seems he couldn't be happier.
We are open on Dr. Henry Augustus Wolfgang (the always great Richard Brake, lately of “Barbarian”) and his half-wit assistant Floop (Jorge Garcia), who are in the midst of preparing the doctor's greatest experiment yet: creating the perfect man out of the dead flesh of geniuses from the past century. The doctor is theoretically in luck this day because Shelly Von Rathbone (Laurent Winkler), one of the great philosophers of the age, has just expired. Unfortunately, his twin brother Shecky (Jeff Daniel Phillips), a bad stand-up comic, has also died and is lying in the same funeral parlor. Floop collects the wrong brother's brain and when Henry debuts his creature on live TV, he finds he has not an impossible genius capable of playing Brahms or speaking perfect French but a big dumb goon (also Phillips) who loves laughing at his own jokes. Though Henry is mortified by the display, someone else is watching who is enthralled. Unmarried and undead Lily (Sheri Moon Zombie), also living in the same neighborhood in Transylvania as the doctor and his creature, has been enduring a string of dreadful first dates trying to find the one. When she sees the creature, whom Floop names Herman Munster, she's instantly smitten. She finds him and they begin a hurried courtship, all the while her father the Count (Daniel Roebuck) looks on with disdain and tries to break them up. He sees Herman as an uncouth ape unworthy of his gorgeous daughter. Of course, they come together when Herman accidentally sells the family estate to one of the Count's vengeful ex-girlfriends Zoya Krupp (Catherine Schell). They've got to move to America and if the Count doesn't want to get left behind, he'd better become a more loving father-in-law in a hurry.
Strong plotting is not one of Zombie's strengths as a writer, so it's not altogether surprising that The Munsters feels less like a story than a collection of sketches. Ostensibly functioning as a pre-Eddie Munster origin story for either the original television show or a full-on revival that will likely never come to fruition, the film spends most of its runtime in Transylvania as the family congeals.
Zombie's “Munsters” movie is about Adam and Eve figures of a different kind, and in playing their story like an old-fashioned romance and the comedic bits like the funniest jokes ever told, a purity of intention emerges. Every idea is given exactly the attention it needs, because Zombie is trying to do justice to so many things at once: his cast of beloved regulars, his obsessions as a creator and consumer, the original TV show he's adapting, and the time his younger self spent glued to the TV set forming his personality (not for nothing does TV play such a crucial function in this movie's plot), unconsciously planning a life that has looped back around to this moment.
It's that charm that ultimately saves The Munsters from Rob Zombie's worst impulses. As a movie, it's nothing but loose ends, a lukewarm stew of concepts that haven't been stirred enough to combine in the cauldron. But as a faux television pilot, the actors, the sketches, the sight gags, and the puns mesh together endearingly in precisely the kind of experience that would have drawn weekly audiences in a more innocent era of broadcast television. Zombie's passion is evident, and while it seems unlikely that he will ever get to follow up on the ideas set up here, canonically it fits snugly into the space immediately prior to the show's actual 1964 premiere, making it both a prequel and a worthy successor to the show he loves so much.
