In The Munsters, Rob Zombie trades trailer trash horror for cheeky fun

The Munsters may be one of the strangest cinematic passion projects of the last few years. Stripping away his usual violent edgelord tendencies, writer-director Rob Zombie has made a film that is explicit only in how family friendly it is—a departure that’s sure to throw his fans for a loop. While this newfound tone doesn’t count as a strike against the film’s quality, it also doesn’t do much to excuse Zombie’s usual faults as a storyteller, namely in terms of narrative coherence. But as a love letter to the sitcom that so inspired Zombie as a child, The Munsters might be the most authentic-feeling television revival ever put on film, warts and all.

Strong plotting is not one of Zombie’s strengths as a writer, so it’s not altogether surprising that The Munsters feels less like a story than a collection of sketches. Ostensibly functioning as a pre-Eddie Munster origin story for either the original television show or a full-on revival that will likely never come to fruition, the film spends most of its runtime in Transylvania as the family congeals.

Herman (Jeff Daniel Phillips) is brought to life by the scenery-devouring Dr. Wolfgang (Richard Brake) and his hunched assistant Floop (Jorge Garcia) in a subplot reminiscent of Young Frankenstein, pursuing stardom as a combination stand-up comedian and rock star. Vampiress Lily (Sheri Moon Zombie) enters the dating world, though the search for a husband produces some underwhelming results. Her father, The Count (Daniel Roebuck), collaborates with his familiar Igor (a very game Sylvester McCoy) to push his daughter toward a wealthy husband, a desire that’s foiled when Herman finally enters their lives. Meanwhile, the Count’s ex-wife Zoya (Catherine Schell) plots to steal his family mansion with the assistance of his debt-ridden werewolf son Lester (Tomas Boykin).

These conflicts don’t so much narratively resolve as they quietly drop away once they become inconvenient, with priority being placed on establishing the television show’s domestic Mockingbird Lane status quo instead of providing these characters with fulfilling arcs or giving the film anything resembling a consistent throughline. The closest The Munsters comes is the romance between Herman and Lily, but despite the Count’s initial (and eventually dropped) protestations, there isn’t much of a barrier to the consummation of their relationship, and the mansion-stealing subplot is simply a means to an end to move the family to California. In fact, the film doesn’t stop throwing new half-formed conflicts at the Munsters until just before the credits roll, when a deus ex machina arrives to provide a flatly expedient ending.

But for all this messiness, the sheer amount of charm that Zombie and his crew have injected into this little film feels palpable. As a vehicle for a pastiche of ’60s sitcom comedy, it’s a gold mine, with Zombie’s writing being shockingly funny in exactly the hokey, earnest way one would expect from an actual episode of The Munsters. Very few concessions have been made to update the material for modernity, as the soundtrack accompanies punning line reads and goofily macabre sight gags with slide whistles and cartoon sound effects—so much so, that one wonders if Zombie ever considered a studio audience laugh track. Even the set, shot in color as one of the few stylistic updates to the source material, is populated by cheap props lit in artificial neon like a particularly intricate Spirit Halloween display, which only adds to the charming artificiality of the whole affair.

It certainly doesn’t hurt that Zombie’s usual stable of actors gives their all to this material. Sheri Moon Zombie is an appropriately lovestruck Lily, while Daniel Roebuck’s curmudgeonly Count is a hilarious straight man whenever he isn’t engaging in vaudevillian antics. Richard Brake deserves special mention as the Vincent Price-inspired mad scientist, but the absolute show-stealer is Jeff Daniel Phillips’ Herman Munster, with a squeaky adolescent inflection to his line reading that plays gangbusters with his oafishly blockheaded physicality.

It’s that charm that ultimately saves The Munsters from Rob Zombie’s worst impulses. As a movie, it’s nothing but loose ends, a lukewarm stew of concepts that haven’t been stirred enough to combine in the cauldron. But as a faux television pilot, the actors, the sketches, the sight gags, and the puns mesh together endearingly in precisely the kind of experience that would have drawn weekly audiences in a more innocent era of broadcast television. Zombie’s passion is evident, and while it seems unlikely that he will ever get to follow up on the ideas set up here, canonically it fits snugly into the space immediately prior to the show’s actual 1964 premiere, making it both a prequel and a worthy successor to the show he loves so much.