For a while, the film is fairly scattershot, since the whole burlesque jape of monsters who are harmless in a high-kitsch way has already been done to death it’s now literally kids’ stuff. Rob Zombie spends a lot of time forgoing that joke, showing us instead how the Munsters got to be the Munsters. On your black-and-white TV set, there was a terrific joke nestled under the dusty Universal gothic-fright sets and make-up of “The Munsters” - namely, that Herman Munster and his clan looked like something out of a nightmare, but it never occurred to them that they were anything but the most ordinary family on earth (because, in fact, they were). He can’t make up his mind whether he’s a rock star or a loser. And it’s the source of his comic schizophrenia. But that’s just part of what makes him, all over again, a nerd in a monster’s body. Herman has been updated to the rock ‘n’ roll era, so he now thinks he’s cool. ![]() Phillips expertly channels the great Fred Gwynne, nailing the sitcom Herman’s haw-haw-haw guffaw, his dyspeptic frown, the bull-in-a-china-shop brute strength that erupts in spite of himself, and something that’s tricker to capture - Herman’s quality of inner delicacy. The best thing in the movie is Jeffrey Daniel Phillips’ performance as Herman, the milquetoast clown Frankenstein. I just have a personality… YOU CAN’T HANDLE!”), and for these two it’s panting love at first sight. Herman, with green skin, black lips, a flat head, and the body of a 7-foot-tall linebacker, is a numbskull, a geek, and (as The Count puts it) a creampuff, but he thinks of himself as a hipster he speaks in phrases like “That sounds boss, man!” Lily meets him after he plays a punk-rock gig in S&M leather (“People say I have a bad attitude - I don’t. Frankenstein character (it devotes far too much time to his generic neurasthenic British seething). Lily wakes up from the doldrums when she first sees the creature who has been stitched together in a lab by Wolfgang (also played by Richard Brake), the movie’s Dr. (As if anyone was asking for that.) It’s all about how Lily ( Sheri Moon Zombie), a maiden vampire with two-tone hair and an undead glow, living with her vampire dad The Count (Daniel Roebuck) in a Transylvania castle of psychedelic chintz, recovers from her life of bad dates with bad monsters - we see one with Orlock, the rat-man bloodsucker of “Nosferatu,” played by Richard Brake as the cuddliest of creeps. ![]() Instead of taking all his cues from the show, Zombie, who wrote the script (you can feel his joy in giving Herman the groan-worthy vaudeville one-liners he delivers as if they were gems), has dreamed up the Munsters’ origin story. “The Munsters” debuted in 1964, in the middle of the age of theater-of-the-absurd American sitcoms, yet the show, if anything, was less corny, less obvious, and lighter on its feet than this overstuffed update/reboot, with its Famous Monsters of Filmland cameos and contempo catch phrases. The film is a lot like its hero, Herman Munster: benignly dim-witted, Day-Glo in color, top-heavy with tomfoolery, lumbering in one direction and then the next, always cracking itself up in an innocently aggressive monster-mash way. Yet “The Munsters,” the family-of-ghouls ’60s sitcom that Zombie is adapting, was such a ticky-tacky piece of gothic bat-house surrealism that the movie, broad and slovenly as it is, works more than it doesn’t. ![]() It’s like watching a Tim Burton film with the cheekiness turned up to 11 and the film technique dialed down to 2. ![]() In “ The Munsters,” the director Rob Zombie makes a game attempt to pass off his amateurishness as attitude.
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