BEFORE: I had to watch this one in September, because I saw the alert on Netflix that this film would be leaving that platform on 9/27. Well, thanks for the heads-up I guess but that doesn't really work for me, since I had plans to watch it in October. Ah, but WHICH October? I tried for three years and couldn't link to it, so I kept saying "next time maybe" and sure, there's a danger in planning too far ahead, because eventually everything will scroll off of every platform and we'll all turn to dust and bad movies will live on in the Great Server in the Sky. Or they'll just go to Tubi, whichever. But since it was a for-sure link in my 2025 horror chain, I figured I'd better watch it during its final hours, because there's a chance it might not pop up anywhere.
Also we're planning to go out of town for a week in October as usual, visit my parents and hit the North Carolina State Fair, so having a couple films already watched will help me stay on track, despite losing 7 or 8 days of access to a computer. Knowing that this film was about to disappear made me do a little triage, like what can I watch ahead of time, what's quick and available now that I can pre-review, what film can I drop because it's not helping with the linking this month but could serve a more necessary linking purpose next October?
Jorge Garcia will carry over from "Cooties", I think, if things go well, and then Roderick Hill will carry over to something else. God willing.
THE PLOT: Reboot of "The Munsters", which followed a family of monsters who moves from Transylvania to an American suburb.
AFTER: God damn, this was really terrible. I programmed this and now I don't know why. Nobody wanted a reboot of this campy old 1960's TV show, except maybe the director. Simply nobody out in the audience, and that's millions of people, wanted to see more of these characters. It's stupid across the board, and slapstick humor really should have died with this show or Jerry Lewis.
Worse, even fans of the show were not clamoring for an origin story. The show never had one, they just threw a bunch of characters together and said that a Frankenstein Monster could be married to a vampire and they have a werewolf son, and that was the end of it. It was funny (back then) and maybe nobody even thought about the logistics of a monster family, like how is that all going to work? They have a dragon for a pet and a crazy uncle, and how much more can we steal from "The Addams Family" and not get sued? "The Munsters" was kind of like "The Outer Limits" to the more popular "Twilight Zone", if something works then somebody else is going to rip it off, but they just won't do it as well. I think the funniest stuff about the old TV show was the jokes they DIDN'T make, like they had a daughter who was totally normal, as in non-monster, and they never explained that or even referred to it. What was her deal? Was she adopted? Some kind of mutant?
The film does not get off to a great start, because they start with the creation of Herman Munster, and they use the same bit as "Young Frankenstein", where the inept lab assistant steals the wrong brain from the morgue... He was supposed to steal the brain of a dead astro-physicist, Shelly von Rathbone, but as luck would have it, that man's stand-up comic brother, Shecky, died on the same day and wouldn't you know it, ended up in the same morgue. What are the odds? There can't be more than 10,000 morgues all over the world because people die all over the place.
Meanwhile, a vampire named the Count (no name?) is trying to solve his 150-year-old vampire daughter's love life, she went out with a very old vampire named Count Orlock and it was disappointing, to say the least. I thought all vampires were suave and seductive and could hypnotize ladies into their bedrooms and such - why would vampires date each other? Anyway, they watch "Good Morning Transylvania" together and witness Dr. Wolfgang's reveal of the Herman Munster creation, who tells bad jokes badly, but still slightly better than he did when he was alive. (He "died" on stage, metaphorically, in addition to dying for real, I guess.) Lily falls in love with the brutish bad comic, what could possibly go wrong with this relationship?
Meanwhile, the Count's ex-wife is a gypsy fortune-teller and she tricks the Count's werewolf son, Lester (how many times has the Count been married?) into signing over the Count's castle to pay his debt to her so she can turn it into a casino. Well, I think we can all see what's coming, it would be obvious to a blind bat.
Herman's career takes off and Lily goes to see him perform with his punk band - this is confusing, is he a stand-up comic or a punk singer, or somehow both? I can't name one person who is both of these things. They date for a week in a montage that looks like it came from a bad 1960's beach party movie, and they go on vacation to Devil's Island, where Herman proposes. During the wedding the "big twist" is that Lester the werewolf gets Herman to put up the Count's castle as collateral for some business deal, but really he's signing away the castle (which he DOES NOT own, so that can't possibly be legally binding...)
It's a long way to go with a reboot, the characters HAVE a Transylvanian castle already, so why not just leave it there? The plot has to bend itself over backwards to get them to lose the castle they already have, forces them to move to Los Angeles and start over, only to somehow put them in a spooky broken-down house in a cul-de-sac that looks a bit like the castle that they used to have.
Then there's more forced plot points, because they have to explain how they got a full-fledged dragon to live under the stairs as a pet. Not that anyone was ever wondering about how this happened, so there was no real reason to explain this, but the Munsters honeymoon in Paris, where they capture a creature that was living in the Paris sewer system, and somehow they're able to bring this baby dragon with them to America and it doesn't get confiscated at the border.
Herman was hoping to get work in Hollywood, I guess because he had both a comedy career and a punk band in Transylvania? But the only job he can find is digging graves, so naturally this sets up the TV series perfectly, it's like the "Rogue One" of Munsters stories. OK, maybe the funniest bit in the film is that they arrive in L.A. on Halloween, so they see their new neighbors partying in spooky costumes and assume that they're all monsters and freaks, the true horror comes the next morning when Halloween is over and they realized they have to live among regular Americans, the true "monsters".
This feels like what you might get if John Waters made a horror film. Is that the vibe somebody was going for? Like, completely ridiculous and campy but also with an underlying soft message about being accepted for being different? You know, with a bunch of cameos from the director's friends and also a bunch of wanna-be actors or ones that never really hit it big? Because this really kind of feels like "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" mixed with "Hairspray". Just me?
Directed by Rob Zombie
Also starring Jeff Daniel Phillips (last seen in "An American Pickle"), Sheri Moon Zombie, Daniel Roebuck (last seen in "River's Edge"), Richard Brake (last seen in "Barbarian"), Sylvester McCoy (last seen in "Dracula" (1979)), Catherine Schell (last seen in "On Her Majesty's Secret Service"), Cassandra Peterson (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Tomas Boykin, Levente Torkoly, Jeremy Wheeler (last seen in "Poor Things"), Roderick Hill (ditto), Laurent Winkler (ditto), Mark Griffith (last seen in "Colette"), Viktor Egri, Norbert Veszelszky, Attila Torok, Marton Vincze, Dave Thompson (last seen in "Rocketman"), Fred Coury, Renata Gratz-Kiss, Val McDaniel, Adrian Neven Du Mont, Marika Farkasinszki, Zoltan Koppany, Judit Dobos, Dusan Vitanovics, Maomi Neven Du Mont, Jonny Dawson, Gyorgy Hermann, Adam Zambrzyscki, Laszlo Nadassy, Bence Balogh, Dora Koves (last seen in "Radioactive"), Miklos Kapacsy.
and the voices of Butch Patrick (last seen in "The Phantom Tollbooth"), Pat Priest (last seen in "Airport"), Dee Wallace (last seen in "Spielberg") with archive footage of Lou Costello (last seen in "The One and Only Dick Gregory"), Boris Karloff (last seen in "House of Dracula").
RATING: 3 out of 10 magic potions (that don't work right)
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