The Munsters [2022] – review

Director: Rob Zombie

Release Date: 2022

Contains spoilers

The trouble with rebooting a beloved show like The Munsters is that it is a firm favourite. That’s not to say that such a reboot can't be done, as amply demonstrated by the 1991 Addams Family film – but that had something distinctly in its favour, which I’ll come to.

When it was announced that Rob Zombie was going to make The Munsters I was split. Known for his hardcore horror, Zombie is actually a filmmaker I rather like (and have touched on House of 1000 Corpses in a past post) but I don’t think every film he makes is a hit and certain ones, 31 for instance, are very much misses. That said, I understand he is a fan of the show and this is a love letter to it.

Wolfgang and the zombie

Starting in a graveyard we have Doctor Henry Augustus Wolfgang (Richard Brake, Bingo Hell) and his helper Floop (Jorge Garcia) breaking into a crypt. They open the coffin within but it's empty. We also see a scrawny figure walking through the graveyard and entering the tomb. It is the supposed occupant, now a zombie, and Wolfgang bops him on the noggin and, after a photo with the corpse, says he is after the fingers, alive the zombie was a world-famous pianist.

I've been making a man...

Wolfgang is making a man and grave robbing is de rigueur for such an activity. Two brothers have recently died, one a low intelligence, unfunny comedian and the other the smartest man (or second smartest according to Wolfgang) in the world. He sends Floop into the funeral home to get the second’s brain, and Floop (of course) steals the brain of the comedian. Wolfgang goes ahead and makes his creation and thinks, at first, that the procedure has failed but then he lumbers into life.

disco vampire

Meanwhile The Count (Daniel Roebuck, the Vampire Hunters Club) is being waited on by butler Igor (Sylvester McCoy, Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric & Slumber). Note that he is not Grandpa yet and neither is he referred to as Dracula. The Count asks if Lily (Sheri Moon Zombie, House of 1000 Corpses) is up yet and is informed she is on a date with Orlok. We see the date and it doesn’t go well. When he tries to woo her with a “disco vampire” routine she goes home.

The Count and Lester

At breakfast with her father Lily watches Good Morning Transylvania and Wolfgang is on to present his creation. However, instead of the talented and inciteful person he thought he'd made, the creature is at first inarticulate, then a bit of a boob, awfully clumsy but somehow woos the audience with his comedy (bearing in mind that the original owner of the brain wasn’t successful as a comic). Wolfgang flounces off to a leper colony in disgust and Floop manages the creature’s career (until he doesn’t) and gives him the name Herman Munster (Jeff Daniel Phillips, Son of Darkness: To Die For 2 & Freaks of Nature). Lily sees him on TV and tries to meet him, meanwhile Lester (Tomas Boykin), a werewolf and the Count’s estranged son, is having to get the castle off the Count for the Count’s ex-wife Zoya (Catherine Schell, Dracula (2020)), a money lender that Lester is in hock to.

family

That is the film then, a prequel to the series with Lily and Herman’s romance, the Count’s (half-arsed) attempt to split them up and how they end up in America. So, on the positive side, the Munsters looks great most of the time, with fantastic sets and lighting. Also, Roebuck pulls off the Count with aplomb and Phillips’ makes a grand stab at emulating Fred Gwynne. Unfortunately, there is much wrong. I had worried that Zombie, in creating a love letter to the original, would pitch the film in the same comedic tone as the original – grand for a rewatch of the series but we have moved on comedically as a homogenous audience. There is a degree of this but also the comedy is pretty flimsy in and of itself. 

She's got Lily Munster eyes

I wasn’t impressed by Sheri Moon Zombie’s take on Lily, it just felt too much of a chewing of scenery and not enough actually acting and emoting. She made the character flighty, which is just not the character, and was the weakest link of the three principle actors. There were a couple of tone-deaf moments – Lily and Herman dressed as Sonny and Cher singing ‘I Got You Babe’ didn’t broadcast the wholesome love the characters projected in the series, with them emulating a known toxic relationship, and Herman’s out of tune singing on it was entirely off. More so the character Zoya, a woman scorned and a loan shark who is looking to embezzle the castle, was coded as Romani. Now early horror often coded gypsies (to use the pejorative) negatively but those films were of a time. I understand Zombie was reaching back to those old films but, in the 21st century, he veered into a place that could be accused of racism and rather he could have had the vengeful ex-wife character without negatively coding the ethnicity like that.

Daniel Roebuck as the Count

At the head I mentioned the Addams Family and it had one thing that this is missing in entirety – a plot. Where this just seems to move from situation to situation, the loss of the house in the Addams Family is then followed with an attempt to get it back and the redemption of Fester as he gets his memory back. Perhaps it is not as convoluted as some but it certainly had more depth than this.  In this we go: Herman is made, he and Lily meet and marry, Lester gets the castle deed by tricking Herman, homeless they all move to America, immediately find and buy the house and Lester (at the very end) redeems himself by something he did off screen, though the castle remains in Zoya’s possession, and they now live in America. 

1313 Mockingbird Lane *

Queue us arriving at the TV series as the end scenes are the opening credits to the original series redone with the new actors. I’m not suggesting a convoluted ‘get the castle back’ plot, after all they have to move to America, but certainly something plot worthy wouldn’t have gone amiss – there is no ‘will they, won’t they’ with Lily and Herman, Wolfgang is just glad to be rid of Herman, Grandpa goes from not wanting them together to grudgingly accepting his son in law without an arc that creates the acceptance. This is then all wrapped into an overly long film. Still, it is very pretty. 3.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

*I assume the house is still on Mockingbird Lane but we only see a sign for Mockingbird Heights.