THE MUNSTERS (2022)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

The original MUNSTERS does not seem like it ought to be a difficult franchise to reboot. Standard sitcom stories, but altered to a fit a family of Transylvanian emigres who are blissfully unaware that regular Americans deem them monsters. And yet a bad series reprise, a busted TV pilot, and five movies, both theatrical and televised, have not been able to duplicate the original show's appeal. And though I hoped writer-director Rob Zombie would prove the exception-- given his express love for the series and for Classic Universal monster-movies-- the 2022 MUNSTERS rates no higher than being a failure more interesting than the others.

I'm not familiar with Zombie's entire repertoire, but based on my experience with his two HALLOWEEN reboots and his graphic novel THE HAUNTED WORLD OF EL SUPERBEASTO, I get that his biggest shortcoming is his fannishness-- not for other people's stories, but for his own. Zombie's a triple-threat creator-- writer, director and rock musician-- but that doesn't mean he doesn't need, like any other creator, to refine and rework raw ideas. I listened to his commentary on the MUNSTERS project he completed for Netflix, and he went into lots of detail about working with the actors, the makeup people and the set designers, and very little about the choices he made in scripting the story.

Zombie gives America's favorite family of fear something no other iteration gave them: an "origin-story," based on bits and pieces related in the teleseries. The story spends the majority of its run-time in a fantasy-version of Transylvania, where various monsters rub shoulders with common humanity. One prestigious family consists of the aristocratic bloodsucker the Count (Daniel Roebuck), his equally vampiric daughter Lily (Sheri Moon Zombie), and her half-brother Lester (Tomas Boykin), who for reasons unknown is a werewolf who's always seen in his wolf-form. (Possibly Lester's a compensation for the absence of the show's "wolf-boy" Eddie Munster, whose character, like that of "cousin Marilyn," won't appear in this continuity until a later period.) Lester's a chiseler whose schemes will result in the Munsters leaving Transylvania for the U.S. of A., but the main focus of the narrative is Lily's fierce desire for a pleasing mate.

Fortuitously, mad doctor Wolfgang and his hunchbacked assistant Floop (Floop? Really, Rob?) put together the man of Lily's dreams. Disappointed in the results of his jury-rigged experiment, Wolfgang conveniently skips town, leaving Floop to dub the flat-skulled, pea-brained man-monster "Herman Munster." ("Like the cheese, you know?") Lily sees Herman (Jeff Daniel Phillips) on TV doing a terrible standup-act, and she's immediately besotted. This leads to a whirlwind romance and speedy nuptials, over the many protests of the Count, who's revolted by his prospective son-in-law. Not long after the marriage, Lester screws things up so that the Count loses his castle. With some convenient prodding, Herman decides he, his wife and his father-in-law will all move to the U.S., where they take up residence at the expected 1313 Mockingbird Lane-- at which the movie trails off, as if leading into a potential series with Zombie's characters.

It should be clear from this two paragraph summation that Zombie missed the boat as far as providing conflict. Now, the original TV show only had the level of conflict possible for a light-hearted sitcom, in which every tense situation is resolved in the end. But a lot of sixties episodes still allowed the characters to get irritated with one another, with the usual comical complications. Zombie establishes that the Count (the future "Grandpa") doesn't like Herman, but he doesn't do anything to shoot Herman down. Lester tricks Herman into signing away the castle-- which doesn't even sound like a legal possibility-- and Lily doesn't even get cross with her husband when he gives away her centuries-old home! The original show was no great work of comic genius, but the scripts consistently allowed the regular characters to get miffed at one another. This strength in the original template may be one of the reasons none of the later reprises proved efficacious. Their makers, like Zombie, were too busy trying to duplicate the superficial aspects of the sixties sitcom to get at the way the characters normally interacted.

Roebuck is very good as Future Grandpa, and Phillips does a decent Herman. But the weakest links are unquestionably Sheri Moon Zombie's performance and the lines her spouse wrote for her. I realize that neither of the two Zombies are required to follow every aspect of the series, and I certainly don't mind the elision of Eddie and Marilyn Munster (though both Butch Patrick and Pat Priest provide some minor voice-work). But I see no advantage in Rob and Sheri Moon changing Lily Munster into a simpering, dithery type, a little like the wife of Cosmo Topper from the 1937 TOPPER. In the series the writers reaped considerable humor from making Lily a dutiful wife who was simultaneously a highly opinionated lady, capable of shifting into Ballbuster Mode at a moment's notice. Twice in this film, Lily gets irritated and performs some sort of "vampire whammy." But in both instances her flashes of anger have no real payoff.

Rob Zombie does provide a number of shout-outs to series concepts: the dragon Spot, the Munsters' Uncle Gilbert (a reasonable facsimile of the Gill Man), and Igor the bat. He also tosses in support-cast members with genre-associations-- Cassandra "Elvira" Peterson, Catherine "Space: 1999" Schell, and Sylvester "Dr Who" McCoy-- but none of them have anything good to work with. THE MUNSTERS looks great, but it could have BEEN great if Zombie had imitated the level of sitcom conflict from the original he so admired.