"The Munsters" glows in the dark with garishly groovy look but falls dead as a feature-length comedy

The Munsters (2022)

When it was announced that Rob Zombie was making a big-screen update of “The Munsters”—the 1964-1966 sitcom about that “other” kooky family that wasn’t named Addams—it made sense. If anyone could bring these ghoulish misfits to life, it would seem to be the shock rocker-turned-grindhouse horror filmmaker. Now having seen the film (and judging by this reviewer’s hopeful smile slowly wearing off), perhaps it wasn’t meant to be. It is still an audaciously dorky labor of love even in execution, but a major problem is that Zombie really magnifies his strengths as a stylist and his faults as a storyteller here, not to mention a storyteller with a knack for comic timing. “Silly” and “zany” are, unfortunately, not in Rob Zombie’s wheelhouse, making “The Munsters” an inoffensive but flat-footed homage in road-company fashion. A PG-rated, family-friendly departure for Zombie or not, this is something of an embarrassment. 

If you were wondering how 150-year-old Transylvanian vampire Lily (Sheri Moon Zombie) and Herman Munster (Jeff Daniel Phillips) met before getting hitched and making the move to California's Mockingbird Lane, "The Munsters" is their origin love story. (Werewolf son Eddie was just a twinkle in Hermie’s eye and niece Marilyn hadn’t yet been adopted.) After a bad first date, Lily is just looking for a man to make her blood run cold. Meanwhile, grave-robbing mad scientist Dr. Henry Augustus Wolfgang (a delectably over-the-top Richard Brake) and his Igor-like assistant (Jorge Garcia) botch a brain transplant and create a monster. Wolfgang’s monster becomes the lovable blockhead Herman Munster (sounds just like the cheese), who immediately becomes the toast of Transylvania as a hack stand-up comedian and musician. When Lily makes the first move and invites Herman to dinner, the sparks immediately fly, but her father, The Count (Daniel Roebuck), doesn't approve. And that’s it, although there is an uninteresting subplot involving Lily’s financially irresponsible werewolf brother Lester (Tomas Boykin) out to do the bidding of the Count’s ex-wife, gypsy queen Zoya Krupp (Catherine Schell), and get her castle back.

At first, there is a certain goofy, cartoonish charm to “The Munsters.” From the set decoration to the costume design to everything involved in the look of the movie (even the kaleidoscopic scene transitions), the campy, Day-Glo art direction is inarguably the most fun thing about it if the film is watched on mute. The garish and kitschy artifice suits the material until it soon dawns on the viewer that every glow-in-the-dark cosmetic merit is just in the service of empty cosplay with a lame, amateurish script. If only Zombie (who wrote the script all by himself) had gotten out of his own way, or maybe the corny puns are supposed to all be wholesomely dreadful? The man behind “House of 1000 Corpses” is just not much of a joke man, and that’s okay! It just spells death for a comedy. There’s never a sharply subversive, tongue-in-cheek approach or an anachronistic spin on the material, like what Barry Sonnenfeld did with “The Addams Family” and “The Addams Family Values,” or what Betty Thomas and Arlene Sanford did with “The Brady Bunch Movie” and “A Very Brady Sequel.” Here, Zombie is just doing “The Munsters” in earnest nearly sixty years later, and it feels like a waste of groovy production design.

If any of the main performers get the tone and assignment right and comes closest to bringing any actual life to their character, it has to be Jeff Daniel Phillips as Herman. He not only looks the part with the Frankenstein’s monster neck bolts and platform boots, but Phillips can be a hoot and kind of endearing as the flat-headed, good-natured buffoon. Alas, he can only do so much with what was written. The same goes for Daniel Roebuck (best known, for me anyway, from TV’s “Matlock” but then turning up in a lot of Zombie’s films), who's at least committed to bringing a lot of gusto to Playgoul-reading Grandpa/The Count. Seeing as how Sheri Moon Zombie has been criticized enough before (and unfairly so) for acting in her husband’s films, whatever she’s doing as Lily Munster seems to be exactly what her director wanted. She’s game, but this is a terrible impersonation. In an attempt to put her own loopy, ethereal spin on Lily without channeling Yvonne De Carlo, Mrs. Zombie puts on an overly mannered, sing-songy shtick (with her fingers pursed and hands up) that turns grating. For fans of the show, members of the old cast make vocal cameos, and in a cute bit role, Cassandra Peterson (Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, herself) plays the Munsters’ realtor. 

When the end credits begin to roll with a dead-on recreation of the show’s black-and-white intro, theme song included, it’s as if this started as a fun dress-up exercise for Halloween Horror Nights. Maybe a whole feature film didn't have to be attached before it. “The Munsters” wants to be a broad comedy, but it’s just desperate and winded. Punched up with one of those bumbling, horn-heavy slapstick soundtracks, the supposed laughs never rise from the dead. The pacing is uneven in a formless narrative, making an already-overlong 110 minutes feel like an interminable 180. And, being too dumbed-down for adults and too oddball or nostalgia-reliant for youngsters, who is this even for? For a macabre comedy that should have been a seasonal delight, "The Munsters" is a deathly unfunny pain in the neck.

Grade: D +

Universal Pictures Home Entertainment is releasing “The Munsters” (110 min.) on digital, Blu-ray, and DVD, and it will available to stream on Netflix on September 27, 2022.