Rob Zombie Owen Gleiberman USA Rock film show Rob Zombie Owen Gleiberman USA

‘The Munsters’ Review: Rob Zombie’s Update of the ’60s Family-of-Ghouls Sitcom Is Just Tacky and Slapdash Enough to Be Likable

Reading now: 972
variety.com

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “The Munsters,” the director Rob Zombie makes a game attempt to pass off his amateurishness as attitude.

It’s like watching a Tim Burton film with the cheekiness turned up to 11 and the film technique dialed down to 2. 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.

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. “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.

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. (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.

Read more on variety.com
The website celebsbar.com is an aggregator of news from open sources. The source is indicated at the beginning and at the end of the announcement. You can send a complaint on the news if you find it unreliable.

Related News

DMCA