The family ghouls
If all you know about heavy metal icon Rob Zombie is his directorial filmography, you would still have absolutely no doubt that here is a man who adores horror cinema. His first seven theatrical features all have the unmistakable energy of somebody who has seen all the movies and knows them inside and out, and is very eager to make extremely earnest and at times undeniably clumsy tributes to those things. You would also probably assume that his preferred flavor of horror is the rough, bleak, nihilistic stuff from the '70s, the grungy grind house filth that represents humanity at its most vicious. But that's simply not true: this is the man, after all, who named his first band in honor of the delightful and extremely cheesy 1932 B-picture White Zombie. This is the man, after all, with a sufficiently well-developed sense of kitsch that he saw fit to take the stage name - and later the legal name - "Rob Zombie". He likes corny shit, too.
Zombie's latest feature - which was sadly not released to theaters, but instead finds him making his second direct-to-video picture, after the 2009 animated film The Haunted World of El Superbeasto - is the point at which that love of all horror, not just the grimy '70s stuff, finally begins to inform his filmmaking. It's a theatrical adaptation of the 1960s sitcom The Munsters, which was itself an early example of what we would later call "brand extension": Universal, having already introduced its stable of classic monsters to Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, took the last step of casting them as the members of a by-the-books family sitcom. Frankenstein's Monster became the sensible father-knows-best head of the household, Herman; Dracula was cranky father-in-law Grandpa; Dracula's daughter then naturally enough would prove to be Herman's wife Lily. And their little son Eddie was a wolfman cub. That makes Zombie's The Munsters a tribute twice over: first to the classic roster of Universal Monsters, and the heavily atmospheric and often heavily cheap movies they starred in between 1931 and 1945, second to the sitcom itself, which has been altered in large ways and small, but always and only with a spirit of profoundest reverence, as only a man whose bestselling solo single was titled" Dragula" in honor of the Munsters' car could be reverent.
Zombie has been trying to get The Munsters off the ground for a long time, and I have two responses, of which I shall start with the more charitable. First, this is very obviously a passion project - you can feel it in practically every shot. The Munsters is almost terrifyingly sincere, treating the narrative tropes and stylistic flourishes of old sitcoms with the awestruck reverence that a filmmaker like Andrei Tarkovsky or Terrence Malick uses to suggest the presence of the divine in daily life. One could say that the film is cheaply made and very silly, that its sense of humor is wholly without sophistication, that its story feels pre-ordained from the very earliest moments, that its acting is mannered and stilted, and one would have said nothing that is untrue, or accidental. The movie exists in this form because Zombie wanted it to: he loves this chintzy shit and he has re-created it with great precision, but not in the process embalming it. The Munsters is lively and energetic, never feeling like a fussed-over museum piece but like a celebration, the work of that one guy in the neighborhood during October who has no clue where to stop in decking his house out with the tackiest Halloween decor and might not fully understand if you suggested that he should stop. It is earnest and adorable and the idea of embarrassment is completely foreign to it.
Second, I'm not sure why, exactly, one would feel so very passionate for this specific project. At a certain remove, the most fulsome praise for The Munsters I can imagine boils down to "what a miraculously good job this does of skillfully and joyously recreating, in minutest detail, things that were sort of terrible in the first place", and other than the infectious joy that comes from seeing somebody do something he obviously loves, I don't really know what one is supposed to get out of that. Not to mention that this ditzy lark, whose single-minded goal is to keep amping up the silliness, lurches in with a punishing 110-minute running time, which includes a prologue that (unless I missed something) is wholly detached from the rest of the film, and something like a five-act structure that starts with a brand new narrative situation in its second half. It's not a fleet movie, however much zany energy it has on a scene-by-scene basis. And its qualities as a comedy are almost impossible to quantify, since the very specific purpose of the film is to pit the caustic Borscht Belt zingers of cranky old Grandpa, here still just known as the Count (Daniel Roebuck, doing a pretty great job of capturing the spirit of Al Lewis but making the character his own thing), against the bumbling, inordinately self-confident godawful dad jokes of the newly-animated Herman (Jeff Daniel Phillips, who isn't really trying to play the same character that Fred Gwynne did - but then, Gwynne's sitcom archetype didn't survive to see the '70s, so the film's Herman is basically parodying an entirely different sitcom type). The point of this to serve up, almost exclusively, jokes with punchlines you can see coming from basically the second that the characters start vocalising the set-ups, and so the question, "is this a good comedy?" is basically irrelevant. I honestly cannot tell who the comedy is meant to be for - I think one could argue, without even meaning it in a dismissive way, that The Munsters is best thought of as a children's movie. But even then, I have to wonder if any child living in the year of our Lord 2022 is as perfectly, beatifically free of all cynicism as Rob Zombie very evidently seems to be.
So this is all a bit of a long-winded way to say that I think The Munsters is confounding and contradictory - sort of unwatchable, but also the literal exact perfect version of itself. Zombie wanted to shoot it in color, and Universal refused, so we could say that it is imperfect in one single way, but I frankly don't agree with him: the color is one of the best parts of the film, with every scene bursting in a Halloween-themed rainbow of toxic greens and ice cold blues and bloody reds. It's one of the cheeriest-looking damn movies I have seen in quite a while, and all the cheerier since what it's depicting is so unreservedly macabre and "spooky" in a way that even a child would find more delightful than actually scary or atmospheric. For all my reservations about whether this "works", it's admittedly hugely endearing, especially since all of Zombie's collaborators have committed themselves to same spirit of "this dumb, dopey nonsense is the most special thing in the world, and we should have as much fun with it as possible". That certainly includes the cast, not just Phillips and Roebuck, but also Richard Brake, playing the mad scientist who is terribly disappointed to have created Herman, and who sneers and spits and keens like a Saturday morning cartoon megalomaniac, and Sheri Moon Zombie, the director's wife and actor in every one of his films, who is giving the best performance of her career in channeling no particular sitcom star per se (certainly not original Lily, Yvonne De Carlo), but is doing a great job of deliberately overplaying the role, giving Lily the breathy line readings and dramatic arm poses of an old-fashioned melodrama heroine who is too committed to the bit to remember that it in fact started as as bit. If there's anything in this film that Rob Zombie loves as much as he loves old Universal horror pictures and The Munsters and cheesy theatricality, it's his wife, who is here being exalted with a worshipful directorial stance that's only matched by the way Paul W.S. Anderson's movies are all not-so-secretly about how he wants us all to love Milla Jovovich as much as he does. And The Munsters goes even harder in on that, since the bulk of the plot is about how Herman is a big dumb dope with a stupid sense of humor who is so unbelievably lucky to have a wife who is so much above his level in every way. It's quite expressly and at times right on the surface a love letter from Mr. Zombie to Mrs. Zombie, which is another reason that it feels okay for it to be so goddamn corny.
Anyway, the earnest love of silliness doesn't end at the cast - also including charming Scottish weirdo Sylvester McCoy, a newcomer to Zombie's films, giving a peerlessly hammy performance as the grave butler Igor - but certainly extends as far as Juci Szurdi's production design andZsuzsa Mihalek's art direction, which are primarily responsible for draping all of this in the finest party store Halloween paraphernalia; costume designers Tóth András Dániel and Godena-Juhász Attila do the same for the humans in the cast. I don't even know who deserves credit for maybe my favorite single gaudy, silly, stupid touch, which is that when Herman or Lily are overwhelmed with passion for each other, they're staged in front of flat walls with colored light being shined through some manner of cucoloris, creating a pop art splash of random shapes that feels like purest '60s kitsch.
All of this adds up to... something? I like the same things Zombie loves (though I was and am more of an Addams Family guy than a Munsters guy), and I found it watchable enough, though I wish it was shorter (the only saving grace of the last stretch is that Cassandra "Elvira" Peterson pops up to play a glad-handing real estate agent right about the exact moment I was ready to start turning on the film). It's incredibly indulgent for something so obviously cheap and quickly-made, and at at a certain point, one can't help but want to stop indulging it. Still, movies that love being movies this intensely are rare enough that I don't want to cast this one aside without cause; it's never anything but cheerful and pleasant and eager as a exceptionally wet-tongued puppy, and there is some special about that, as wearying as it can sometimes be.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Zombie's latest feature - which was sadly not released to theaters, but instead finds him making his second direct-to-video picture, after the 2009 animated film The Haunted World of El Superbeasto - is the point at which that love of all horror, not just the grimy '70s stuff, finally begins to inform his filmmaking. It's a theatrical adaptation of the 1960s sitcom The Munsters, which was itself an early example of what we would later call "brand extension": Universal, having already introduced its stable of classic monsters to Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, took the last step of casting them as the members of a by-the-books family sitcom. Frankenstein's Monster became the sensible father-knows-best head of the household, Herman; Dracula was cranky father-in-law Grandpa; Dracula's daughter then naturally enough would prove to be Herman's wife Lily. And their little son Eddie was a wolfman cub. That makes Zombie's The Munsters a tribute twice over: first to the classic roster of Universal Monsters, and the heavily atmospheric and often heavily cheap movies they starred in between 1931 and 1945, second to the sitcom itself, which has been altered in large ways and small, but always and only with a spirit of profoundest reverence, as only a man whose bestselling solo single was titled" Dragula" in honor of the Munsters' car could be reverent.
Zombie has been trying to get The Munsters off the ground for a long time, and I have two responses, of which I shall start with the more charitable. First, this is very obviously a passion project - you can feel it in practically every shot. The Munsters is almost terrifyingly sincere, treating the narrative tropes and stylistic flourishes of old sitcoms with the awestruck reverence that a filmmaker like Andrei Tarkovsky or Terrence Malick uses to suggest the presence of the divine in daily life. One could say that the film is cheaply made and very silly, that its sense of humor is wholly without sophistication, that its story feels pre-ordained from the very earliest moments, that its acting is mannered and stilted, and one would have said nothing that is untrue, or accidental. The movie exists in this form because Zombie wanted it to: he loves this chintzy shit and he has re-created it with great precision, but not in the process embalming it. The Munsters is lively and energetic, never feeling like a fussed-over museum piece but like a celebration, the work of that one guy in the neighborhood during October who has no clue where to stop in decking his house out with the tackiest Halloween decor and might not fully understand if you suggested that he should stop. It is earnest and adorable and the idea of embarrassment is completely foreign to it.
Second, I'm not sure why, exactly, one would feel so very passionate for this specific project. At a certain remove, the most fulsome praise for The Munsters I can imagine boils down to "what a miraculously good job this does of skillfully and joyously recreating, in minutest detail, things that were sort of terrible in the first place", and other than the infectious joy that comes from seeing somebody do something he obviously loves, I don't really know what one is supposed to get out of that. Not to mention that this ditzy lark, whose single-minded goal is to keep amping up the silliness, lurches in with a punishing 110-minute running time, which includes a prologue that (unless I missed something) is wholly detached from the rest of the film, and something like a five-act structure that starts with a brand new narrative situation in its second half. It's not a fleet movie, however much zany energy it has on a scene-by-scene basis. And its qualities as a comedy are almost impossible to quantify, since the very specific purpose of the film is to pit the caustic Borscht Belt zingers of cranky old Grandpa, here still just known as the Count (Daniel Roebuck, doing a pretty great job of capturing the spirit of Al Lewis but making the character his own thing), against the bumbling, inordinately self-confident godawful dad jokes of the newly-animated Herman (Jeff Daniel Phillips, who isn't really trying to play the same character that Fred Gwynne did - but then, Gwynne's sitcom archetype didn't survive to see the '70s, so the film's Herman is basically parodying an entirely different sitcom type). The point of this to serve up, almost exclusively, jokes with punchlines you can see coming from basically the second that the characters start vocalising the set-ups, and so the question, "is this a good comedy?" is basically irrelevant. I honestly cannot tell who the comedy is meant to be for - I think one could argue, without even meaning it in a dismissive way, that The Munsters is best thought of as a children's movie. But even then, I have to wonder if any child living in the year of our Lord 2022 is as perfectly, beatifically free of all cynicism as Rob Zombie very evidently seems to be.
So this is all a bit of a long-winded way to say that I think The Munsters is confounding and contradictory - sort of unwatchable, but also the literal exact perfect version of itself. Zombie wanted to shoot it in color, and Universal refused, so we could say that it is imperfect in one single way, but I frankly don't agree with him: the color is one of the best parts of the film, with every scene bursting in a Halloween-themed rainbow of toxic greens and ice cold blues and bloody reds. It's one of the cheeriest-looking damn movies I have seen in quite a while, and all the cheerier since what it's depicting is so unreservedly macabre and "spooky" in a way that even a child would find more delightful than actually scary or atmospheric. For all my reservations about whether this "works", it's admittedly hugely endearing, especially since all of Zombie's collaborators have committed themselves to same spirit of "this dumb, dopey nonsense is the most special thing in the world, and we should have as much fun with it as possible". That certainly includes the cast, not just Phillips and Roebuck, but also Richard Brake, playing the mad scientist who is terribly disappointed to have created Herman, and who sneers and spits and keens like a Saturday morning cartoon megalomaniac, and Sheri Moon Zombie, the director's wife and actor in every one of his films, who is giving the best performance of her career in channeling no particular sitcom star per se (certainly not original Lily, Yvonne De Carlo), but is doing a great job of deliberately overplaying the role, giving Lily the breathy line readings and dramatic arm poses of an old-fashioned melodrama heroine who is too committed to the bit to remember that it in fact started as as bit. If there's anything in this film that Rob Zombie loves as much as he loves old Universal horror pictures and The Munsters and cheesy theatricality, it's his wife, who is here being exalted with a worshipful directorial stance that's only matched by the way Paul W.S. Anderson's movies are all not-so-secretly about how he wants us all to love Milla Jovovich as much as he does. And The Munsters goes even harder in on that, since the bulk of the plot is about how Herman is a big dumb dope with a stupid sense of humor who is so unbelievably lucky to have a wife who is so much above his level in every way. It's quite expressly and at times right on the surface a love letter from Mr. Zombie to Mrs. Zombie, which is another reason that it feels okay for it to be so goddamn corny.
Anyway, the earnest love of silliness doesn't end at the cast - also including charming Scottish weirdo Sylvester McCoy, a newcomer to Zombie's films, giving a peerlessly hammy performance as the grave butler Igor - but certainly extends as far as Juci Szurdi's production design andZsuzsa Mihalek's art direction, which are primarily responsible for draping all of this in the finest party store Halloween paraphernalia; costume designers Tóth András Dániel and Godena-Juhász Attila do the same for the humans in the cast. I don't even know who deserves credit for maybe my favorite single gaudy, silly, stupid touch, which is that when Herman or Lily are overwhelmed with passion for each other, they're staged in front of flat walls with colored light being shined through some manner of cucoloris, creating a pop art splash of random shapes that feels like purest '60s kitsch.
All of this adds up to... something? I like the same things Zombie loves (though I was and am more of an Addams Family guy than a Munsters guy), and I found it watchable enough, though I wish it was shorter (the only saving grace of the last stretch is that Cassandra "Elvira" Peterson pops up to play a glad-handing real estate agent right about the exact moment I was ready to start turning on the film). It's incredibly indulgent for something so obviously cheap and quickly-made, and at at a certain point, one can't help but want to stop indulging it. Still, movies that love being movies this intensely are rare enough that I don't want to cast this one aside without cause; it's never anything but cheerful and pleasant and eager as a exceptionally wet-tongued puppy, and there is some special about that, as wearying as it can sometimes be.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
