Poor Lily (Sheri Moon Zombie). She’s just an undead gal looking for the right reanimated corpse to spend her afterlife with, and the dates that her vampire grandpa (Daniel Roebuck) sets her up on are the wrong kind of monstrous. Then she spots the gorgeous hunk Herman Munster (Jeff Daniel Phillips) fresh off the mad scientist’s (Richard Brake) slab and is instantly smitten. Everything is going great in their horrifying romance until Lily’s conniving brother Lester (Tomas Boykin) cons them out of the family castle. Now this creepy fam is headed for Hollywood, California to make it any way they can.
Rob Zombie’s filmmaking career is really, really strange. After all the very adult craziness that he’s been shoving into audience’s eyes over the years, seeing him make something that sticks to a PG rating -that means no foul language, gnarly sex scenes, or people getting their faces stomped into a pulp- is truly a surreal sight to behold. After watching The Munsters (2022), I can assure you that stranger things have not happened quite like this before. How the hell he managed to convince a major studio to give him the cash to make this outrageous tribute to his favorite TV show with his usual troupe of wackos and “more is more” aesthetic is beyond my understanding.
Now you’ll have to forgive me, I’m strictly going on my very fuzzy memories of the original “The Munsters” show, which I haven’t seen in about 30 years or so. But Sheri Moon Zombie and Daniel Roebuck gleefully inhabit the roles of Lily and Grandpa, getting eerily close to the previous iterations of the characters. I think Jeff Daniel Phillips takes Herman to a whole other planet, and it’s a planet that I don’t mind visiting. He’s way more rock and roll (read as: deranged) than I anticipated. Everyone in the cast is wildly energetic and committed to giving this tacky insanity their all, but for my money, Richard Brake almost steals the dang movie. I really hope to see him in more zany comedies in the future.
Structurally speaking, this film is a frustrating mess. The Munsters feels like 4 or 5 episodes of a series stitched together to get to its overly long 110-minute running time. Now I am a fan of long movies, but this has almost as many montages as Dick Tracy (1990). The paper-thin plot bounces along through all kinds of goofball situations, and in typical Rob Zombie fashion, everything in that Halloween-filled brain of his -no matter how hokey- is jammed in here. Worse than all of that, however, is the ending. This really doesn’t have one. It just kind of stops which is a big bummer after such a long running time. The whole film lacks focus and only a tighter plot and a hardass editor could’ve saved it. Heck, this episodic structure might have even worked had this been a series, but alas, we’ll never know.
All that being said, my wife and I had a great time with The Munsters. It’s garishly beautiful- or ravishingly hideous -I’m still working on this sentence- and chock full of dad jokes and broad physical comedy that had us cackling. Much like the ramshackle plot, every one of its lavish and colorful sets are overloaded with spooky bric-a-brac that teeters on the edge of madness. This movie is freakin’ wild and my eyes are just now starting to un-melt themselves. I hope that I am not one of the only people who genuinely enjoys The Munsters in spite of its flaws, but I won’t be surprised if I am. Full disclosure: I’m very forgiving with good old RZ’s work, and I’m an easy mark for corny insanity. Clearly his heart was in the right place and that counts for a lot in my book.
As usual with Rob Zombie’s films, there is a long Behind-The-Scenes documentary (that clocks in at a little over an hour) and a director’s commentary track.