It's safe to say that Universal Pictures realized this, deciding not to waste time by releasing the film in theaters and instead go straight to DVD and Blu-ray. His film also won't make anyone a fan of the original show, and actual fans of the original will probably hate this. Many Rob Zombie movies have a dark, twisted sense of humor, but The Munsters is a far cry from any of that. Inversely, any fan of Zombie will not find much to like in this film aside from the visuals, which take his usually heightened style and elevates it 1,000%. The Munsters movie will not make anyone a fan of Zombie if by some Halloween miracle it does, Zombie's other films are so much more disturbing and often disgusting that they won't be a fan for long. Zombie and his crew created a massive, incredibly designed set in Budapest (where most of the film was shot), and the Mockingbird Lane neighborhood and house are a crowning achievement in the visual jewels for this crown of thorns. This area isn't introduced until what feels like five hours have passed (or an hour and 25 minutes, to be precise), and is woefully underused. The set design of the movie is generally perfect, from Grandpa's comically large and gothic castle to the Munsters' new neighborhood, where their elaborately dilapidated house sits next to the gorgeously recreated suburban fantasy world of Mockingbird Lane. Gorgeous swaths of Frankenstein-green and blood-red wash over certain scenes, while the light particles often sparkle throughout plumes of fog and mist. The lighting is expressionistically exaggerated and goes for the extreme like most other parts of the film. In fact, watching it on mute would almost definitely make this a better film (perhaps with a Rob Zombie album on in the background). As cringe-worthy as The Munsters is to actually watch, it's gorgeous to look at. Nobody except costume and set designers, that is. There's no real plot here it's mostly uncomfortably long periods of attempts at humor, as Lily (Sherry Moon Zombie) and Herman Munster (Jeff Daniel Phillips) meet and fall in love, to the chagrin of her Grandpa (Dan Roebuck). "A horse walks into the bar, the bartender says, 'Why the long face?'" Herman Munster 'jokes' without any ironic self-awareness. What was funny and/or scary in the mid-'60s usually isn't 60 years later, so it's surprising just how much Zombie's truly PG Munsters movie sticks to essentially the exact same lame jokes as the old TV series. Of all kinds of material, comedy and horror are the two genres most dependent on and subservient to age and time. The original show was highly popular, achieving higher ratings than its contemporary sister show The Addams Family. It existed during a weird time in television, a kind of first wave of horror comedies, alongside The Addams Family and Scooby-Doo!, and supernatural comedies like Bewitched and I Dreamed of Jeannie even soap operas got in on the craze with Dark Shadows. The Munsters was of course a classic American TV show that featured silly variations of classic monsters (vampires, werewolves, Frankensteins, and so on) as they try to live like a normal family in the modern world. There's a lot of tender love and care that went into producing The Munsters (and the meticulous attention to visual detail is the only great result), but the end product proves that sometimes love is not enough. But the obvious effort and care that went into The Munsters is deserving of a more thoughtful response, and also why the film feels like such a tragedy - Zombie, his cast, and the film's crew are entirely committed and seem to deeply care for not just the source material but for their shared vision. Technically, a review for the film could simply consist of the acronym 'WTF,' which was the consistent response from many Zombie fans when the true trailer for the film was released. Yes, the director who disturbed countless viewers and enthralled gore-hounds with his nasty, trashy tributes to exploitation horror films has now made perhaps the silliest, stupidest comedy movie of the year, The Munsters. Believe it or not, this is the new Rob Zombie film, and this kind of bad is as good as it gets. A tuba farts along in the background as a hyperbolically dumb character lazily spouts the line, "Sure made his life harder than it had to be, with a name like Uranus," a piece of writing which is literally followed by a slide whistle on the soundtrack.
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