The Munsters (2022) poster

The Munsters (2022)

Rating:


USA. 2022.

Crew

Director/Screenplay – Rob Zombie, Based on the TV Series Based on Characters Created by Ed Haas & Norm Liebmann From a Format by Al Burns & Chris Hayward, Producers – Mike Elliott & Rob Zombie, Photography – Zoran Popovic, Music – Zeuss, Visual Effects – Mutiny VFX (Supervisor – Dustin Solomon), Special Effects Supervisor – Robert Horvath, Makeup Effects Design – Wayne Toth, Makeup Effects Supervisor – Marta Antal, Production Design – Juci Szurdi. Production Company – 1440 Productions.

Cast

Jeff Daniel Phillips (Herman Munster/Shecky Van Rathbone), Sheri Moon Zombie (Lily Gruesella/Donna Doomley), Daniel Roebuck (The Count/Ezra Mosher), Richard Brake (Dr Henry Wolfgang/Orlok), Jorge Garcia (Floop), Sylvester McCoy (Igor), Tomas Boykin (Lester), Catherine Schell (Zoya Krupp), Cassandra Peterson (Barbara Carr), Levente Torkoly (Bela Krupp), Katia Bokor (Transylvania Airlines Flight Attendant)


Plot

In Transylvania, Lily Grisela lives with her father The Count in his castle but is having no luck finding a suitable husband. Meanwhile, Dr Wolfgang steals a body from the morgue. He sends his hunchback assistant Floop to obtain the brain of the genius physicist Shelly Van Rathobone but Floop instead returns with the brain of Shelly’s recently deceased brother Shecky, a bad stand-up comic. They bring the creation to life and Floop gives it the name Herman Munster. Herman then begins a career as a rock musician. Lily sees Herman on tv and immediately falls for him. She asks Herman to dinner and the two become smitten with one another. They then announce they are getting married, much to the chagrin of The Count who plots ways to get rid of Herman. However, Lily’s werewolf brother Lester tricks Herman into signing the deed to the castle away to the scheming Zoya Krupp. Herman and Lily’s honeymoon in Paris is interrupted to learn that they are now all homeless. Herman decides that they will move to California where he finds the perfect new home with a decayed mansion on Mockingbird Lane.


The tv series The Munsters (1964-66) was patterned after Charles Addams’ Addams Family cartoons – the creators of the show even acknowledged this to be the case. At the same time as The Munsters appeared, The Addams Family was also adapted for tv in the tv series The Addams Family (1964-6). Indeed, The Addams Family premiered six days before The Munsters. Both shows ran for two seasons, although The Munsters ran one month longer and produced 70 episodes against The Addams Family’s 64 episode run. Although The Addams Family is the show that is more well-remembered today, largely due to a number of high-profile revivals, The Munsters actually ranked higher in the ratings back in the day.

Tapping into the same gothic look of the Addams Family, the Munsters were modelled on the classic Universal monsters of the 1930s due to the fact that the series was produced at Universal Studios. Fred Gwynne played a big goofy Frankenstein monster lookalike; Yvonne De Carlo resembled a pasty-faced vampire bride and Al Lewis was the vampiric Grandpa; Butch Patrick was the werewolf son with look modelled on Lon Chaney Jr in The Wolf Man (1941); and Beverly Owen, who dropped out after thirteen episodes and was replaced by Pat Priest, was the perfectly normal teenage niece, hence grotesque to the family.

There were various revivals of the show over the years. The original cast appeared in the feature film Munster Go Home (1966) and then reunited for the tv movie The Munsters Revenge (1981). The Munsters Today (1988-91) was a revival with an entirely new cast and lasted on air for three seasons, although was generally agreed on by fans as lacking the original spark. A different cast yet again appeared in the further tv movie Here Come the Munsters (1995), while yet another cast line-up appeared in the tv movie The Munsters Scary Little Christmas (1996). Mockingbird Lane (2012) was a one-hour pilot for a new version directed by Bryan Singer, although this failed to be picked up as a series.

There have been a whole swathe of film remakes of tv series since the 1990s, beginning with the big screen remake of The Addams Family (1991) and including The Beverly Hillbillies (1993), The Fugitive (1993), Car 54, Where Are You? (1994), The Flintstones (1994), The Brady Bunch Movie (1995), Flipper (1996), Maverick (1996), Mission: Impossible (1996), Leave It to Beaver (1997), The Saint (1997), The Avengers (1998), Lost in Space (1998), The Mod Squad (1999), My Favorite Martian (1999), Wild Wild West (1999), Charlie’s Angels (2000), I Spy (2002); Scooby-Doo (2002), Starsky & Hutch (2004), Thunderbirds (2004), Bewitched (2005), The Dukes of Hazzard (2005), The Honeymooners (2005), Miami Vice (2006), Transformers (2007), Get Smart (2008), Speed Racer (2008), Land of the Lost (2009), Star Trek (2009), The A-Team (2010), Yogi Bear (2010), Dark Shadows (2012), The Sweeney (2012), 21 Jump Street (2012), The Equalizer (2014), Jem and the Holograms (2015), The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), Dad’s Army (2016), Baywatch (2017), CHiPs (2017) and Fantasy Island (2020). See Films Based on TV Series.

The Count (Daniel Roebuck), Lily (Sheri Moon Zombie) and Herman (Jeff Daniel Phillips) in The Munsters (2022)
The Munsters – (l to r) The Count (Daniel Roebuck), Lily (Sheri Moon Zombie) and Herman (Jeff Daniel Phillips)

This film revival of The Munsters come from Rob Zombie. Zombie gained fame as a songwriter/lead singer/guitarist with the heavy metal band White Zombie and then as a solo artist. At the peak of his fame, Zombie began a parallel career as a horror director, making his debut with House of 1000 Corpses (2003). He went onto several other films with The Devil’s Rejects (2005), the remake of Halloween (2007) and its sequel Halloween II (2009), the animated The Haunted World of Superbeasto (2009), The Lords of Salem (2012), 31 (2016) and 3 from Hell (2019).

I must admit to cringing when I first read about the idea of Rob Zombie conducting a remake of The Munsters. The tv series is a sweetly goofy comedy, a kooky parody of a domestic sitcom cast with monster lookalikes. Rob Zombie has never done comedy before, except in the black comedy sense. Instead, his films come with a nihilistic violence, his characters embrace mass murder as catharsis and show a contempt for whitebread innocents. Perhaps the point that Rob Zombie and The Munsters could be said to meet is that they both champion outsiders who reject everyday life. Both also indulge in Genre Homage – The Munsters are modelled on the classic Universal monsters, while Zombie fills his films with cameos from former actors who appear in horror films. However, the conception of a Rob Zombified The Munsters where they were turned into murderous monsters did not hold much appeal.

The opening of The Munsters left me sinking in my chair. The Transylvania sets looked like a bad attempt to copy a Halloween carnival, all shot through with eye-poppingly garish lighting schemes – it felt like an effort to replicate the low-key, often seams showing Gothic aesthetic of the original tv series gone too far. The performances of the assorted tv announcers and of an unrecognisable Richard Brake as Orlok – the vampire from Nosferatu (1922) with Brake made up in his likeness – out on a date with Lily seemed far too campy.

On the other hand, there is this sudden point where Rob Zombie and his cast hit their stride and the film starts to work. This is about the point that Jeff Daniel Phillips emerges on screen as Herman Munster. Phillips is an actor who has flown under my radar before this, but has appeared in most of Rob Zombie’s films going back to Halloween II. Phillips’ recapturing of the big, ungainly lugubrious expressions of Fred Gwynne and his constant corny puns and whole-face guffaws is uncanny. It is really as though the late Fred Gwynne has come back to life in living breathing glory.

Herman (Jeff Daniel Phillips) and Lily (Sheri Moon Zombie) in The Munsters (2022)
Herman (Jeff Daniel Phillips) and Lily (Sheri Moon Zombie) on a date

And from about that point, the film starts to work as a perfect recapturing of The Munsters. (Or at least an origin story for them – it tells how Herman was created, how they met and moved to Mockingbird Lane, although characters like son Eddie and niece Marilyn are not yet introduced). There is the perfect delirium of images of Herman in skull pyjamas lounging in a hotel room, putting on a beret to blend with the locals in the streets of Paris, or decked out in biker leathers and outrageous Hawaiian shirts, which strike the note that the tv series created perfectly. What you have to complement Rob Zombie for his subsuming his inclinations and the type of film he usually churns out and adopting the style of the show to perfection.

Rob’s wife Sheri Moon Zombie is never much of an actor. She goes through all the arch poses as Lily and is creditable in the role. That said, she is outshone by Jeff Daniel Phillips and Daniel Roebuck, who was completely unrecognisable until his name comes up on the end credits, and gives us a more villainous Grandpa than Al Lewis did in the original series.

The rest of the cast is filled out with the usual cameos of forgotten faces that Zombie loves to bring out of mothballs. We get a surprising number of tv faces, including Sylvester McCoy, the Seventh Doctor in tv’s Doctor Who (1963-89, 2005- ), as Grandpa’s manservant; Jorge Garcia, a regular as Hugo on tv’s Lost (2004-10), as the hunchbacked lab assistant; and a 78 year-old Catherine Schell, best known as Maya in tv’s Space: 1999 (1975-7), as the scheming Gypsy local; while Cassandra Peterson aka Elvia turns up as the realtor. Butch Parker, who played Eddie in the original tv series, voices the role of a robot known as Tin Man, while Pat Priest, who was the second Debbie, voices an airline announcer.

The pandemic and shooting in Hungary has cut down on the number of other actors available. Nevertheless, Zombie manages to include clips from other Universal films like The Mummy (1932), Abbott and Costello Meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1953), The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), and credits actors from these like Boris Karloff, Abbott and Costello, Zita Johann, Richard Carlson and Julie Adams as their characters in the end credits.


Trailer here


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