The Munsters Review - Rob Zombie Movie Is a Failed Experiment

Bloody Disgusting’s The Munsters review is spoiler-free.

Horror musician and auteur Rob Zombie is a lifelong fan of The Munsters. The ‘60s sitcom hinged its humor upon a family of odd Transylvanians that behave and consider themselves an average American family. Zombie’s enduring fondness for the show is evident throughout his career, including his 1998 hit song “Dragula,” finally culminating in a feature film that serves as a meet-cute origin story. Zombie attempts to faithfully recreate the original sitcom’s sense of humor, embracing the ridiculous while applying his modern style.

This results in inconsistent, clashing tones and an uninteresting story.

Vampire Lily (Sheri Moon Zombie) longs for love. Her father, The Count (Daniel Roebuck), sets her up on blind dates, but Transylvania’s most eligible bachelors tend to disappoint. Lily finds her perfect mate assembled from various human parts, including that of recently deceased comedian Shecky Von Rathbone (Jeff Daniel Phillips). It’s love at first sight between Lily and the recently revived Shecky, renamed Herman Munster. Their love story takes them on a globe-spanning journey… before they arrive at Mockingbird Lane.

Zombie, who directed and wrote, focuses on Lily, Herman, and introduces his regular cast of supporting players to keep things going. Richard Brake doubles as Dr. Henry Augustus Wolfgang, the mad scientist responsible for Herman, and Orlock, an eccentric vampire with poor dating manners. Jorge Garcia plays Floop, Wolfgang’s hunchback assistant responsible for Herman’s moniker. Aside from a few notable cameos that include Cassandra Peterson, Zombie finds a way to inject lesser-known characters from the sitcom, including Lily’s hapless brother Lester the werewolf (Tomas Boykin).

That rotating roster of colorful characters is vital because there’s not much to the plot. Zombie focuses on the sitcom format, putting Lily and Herman in bizarre situations without much connective tissue. For example, Lily stops at a club to swoon over Herman’s rock performance. It’s a one-and-done gag that serves solely as a comedic stepping stone in their whirlwind romance; Herman abandons his rockstar life almost as abruptly as it began.

While it’s clear Zombie is attempting to recreate the sitcom of yesteryear in modern movie form, that wholesome approach conflicts with his edgier sensibilities, like The Count reading a “Playghoul” magazine or Lester wandering drunk with a bottle of booze. Worse, the endless gags can’t fill in the blanks of a thinly sketched narrative. There’s not much to this origin story, and the incessant attempts to fill those blanks with comedic bits grow tiresome.

Zombie bounces from scene to scene in a nomadic fashion, creating a Frankenstein’s monster-like collage of scenes that range in tone and style. Retro scene transitions bridge Zombie’s use of hyper-saturated color to quick bursts of animation or monochromatic moments. All of it is as manic as Lily and Herman’s rushed romance that sees them bouncing from karaoke to Parisian sewer monster prowls. Visually, The Munsters makes for a fascinating tribute.

The cast fully supports retro sitcom performances. Sheri Moon Zombie emulates the mannerisms and cadence Yvonne De Carlo brought to Lily in 1964; it’s far harder to detect the source material in Daniel Roebuck and Jeff Daniel Phillips’ iterations of their characters. Richard Brake is notable for his dual portrayals of two characters that are both very different but profoundly unique.

Zombie and his cast’s dedication to grafting a wholesome ‘60s family sitcom into a modern feature-length film might’ve worked better in episodic format. Sitcoms toss their characters into different environments and situations to an intentionally ridiculous degree for laughs, and it’s made digestible for its quick bursts limited to self-contained, short episodes. By cramming it all into one overlong movie, The Munsters struggles to find its rhythm from the start. It highlights just how little narrative meat is on its brittle bones and takes far too long to address origin story questions that modern audiences didn’t ask. The disjointed tone and aesthetics only make matters worse.

It’s clear that Rob Zombie harbors a deep passion for the source material, as evidenced by the meticulous details and nods to the original show woven into his latest. While his choices here fascinate as often as they clash with one another, Zombie’s struggle to reconcile his vision with the source material results in a perplexing, failed experiment that quickly overstays its welcome with painfully unfunny jokes and a bland story. 

The Munsters is available on Netflix, Blu-ray, and VOD on September 27.