The Munsters

 Rob Zombie's Netflix-produced The Munsters is either a daring and subversive experimental film or one of the worst movies ever made.  It's not beyond the possibility that the film is both.

A few days ago, I saw Criss Cross with Burt Lancaster and Yvonne de Carlo.  At the end of the film, the villain fires several bullets into Lancaster and his moll, Annie, played by Yvonne de Carlo.  An inserted shot shows the dead actress sprawled across Lancaster's lap, a Baroque posture that recalls images of the Pieta, albeit with the gender reversed.  Sixteen years later, the actress, now a bit matronly, played Lily Munster on TV, costumed in middle-European garments, skin whiter than white, vampire white with long black hair, featuring a Susan Sontag-like streak of silver above her exotically made-up eyes.  The Munsters,, also featuring Al Lewis as the macabre "Grandpa"(with his dragster "Dragula") and Fred Gwynne as the grotesque pater-familias Herman Munster, was probably a pretty bad show, but I recall it with warmth -- the program lasted only two seasons (wiped out by being broadcast opposite Batman during its second series) but Tv casts and crews were hardworking in those days:  seventy shows were produced over the two-year run and ,in 1966, a movie called Munster Go Home was released to little acclaim.  Fred Gwynne wore four-inch asphalt-spreader shoes and had his face painted bright violet so that it would register as a ghastly tint, possibly green, on the black-and-white TV screen.  The series' theme song was excellent, someone noted later that it sounded like Bernard Herrmann channeled through Duane Eddy -- it's a prototype for Danny Elfman's compositions in the eighties, sounding a bit like the theme to The Simpsons.  The tune is so good that it effectively serves as the climax for the re-boot by Rob Zombie.  

Zombie's movie is a prequel to the 1964-1965 TV show.  The plot involves the courtship between Lily, the Grandpa-vampire's daughter, and Herman Munster.  Munster has been built from pieces of cadavers assembled by Count Orlock -- as the name implies, this figure is a rat-like vampire with pointed ears, fangs, and red eyes modeled on the monster in Nosferatu.  Igor, Orlock's assistant, is told to steal the brain of a nuclear physicist, recently deceased and resting in a local morgue.  Instead, he takes the cerebellum of the scientist's twin brother, who happened to die on the same day and ended-up in the same morgue.  The twin brother was a sort of Borscht-belt comedian, specializing in awful puns.  It's his brain that occupies Herman Munster's flat-topped skull and, of course, the mix-up results in the monster spouting terrible jokes and, then, braying loudly at his own jests.  As on the TV show, Herman Munster, who is hideous, believes himself to be movie-star handsome and is an endearing, goofy naif.  Munster woos Lily notwithstanding Grandpa's virulent objections.  (One of the film's better jokes is a sixties-style musical number in which Herman and Lily massacre Sonny and Cher's "You got me, Babe.")  The couple get married and honeymoon in Paris, a place that is shown as voluptuously beautiful and that the honeymooners disdain.  (A running gag in the movie, as in the TV show, is the Munster's complete inversion of aesthetic values  -- they regard the ugly as beautiful and the beautiful as disturbingly hideous.)  Herman gets schnookered by Lily's shady brother-in-law who is a werewolf in debt to a sinister gypsy named Zoya.  Herman signs over the family's vast and oppressive castle to Zoya as part of a business deal with the werewolf.  Evicted from their home in Transylvania, the family has to decamp to Mockingbird Heights (near Hollywood), where they buy a decaying Victorian mansion at 1313 Mockingbird Street, the address where the monsters lived in the TV series.  The Munsters move into their home on Halloween and are duly impressed by their neighbors who seem to all be horrible-looking ghouls and zombies.  In the morning, they find that their neighborhood is full of yuppies, all of them blonde and wholesome, with their perfect little families.  The Munsters are horrified but, in the spirit of the Civil Rights movement, decide that what matters about people is not how they look, but the quality of their characters -- and, so, they persevere, avowing that they will try to become good members of the community.  Herman gets a job man-handling corpses at the local mortuary and the film ends with a pastiche of the opening theme song and sequence from the TV show, complete with Herman busting clumsily through the front door with Lily and Grandpa following.  (In this show, there's no trace of the vampire child, Eddie Munster, nor do we see Marilyn Munster, the family's "normal-looking", indeed, glamorous daughter, who is, however, the subject of her parents sympathy, because she is so ugly.)  The movie is a bit like several of the TV shows patched together -- it's episodic with sequences that don't really connect with the main plot:  for instance, in Paris, Herman and Lily go into the sewers to capture a labrador-sized monster that has been terrorizing people.  The sewers are a great set and the monster is effectively designed, but this part of the movie is a complete dead-end.  I don't think these sorts of effects are accidental; Rob Zombie seems to be interested in duplicating the stuttering stop-and-start rhythm of sixties sit-coms.

Zombie's film is shot in color on completely stylized and artificial sets -- it looks like a garish technicolor version of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  Everything is expressionistic and lit with bizarre flares of orange and violet light until the family reaches Mockingbird Lane -- there the exteriors are shot in natural light, but the colors remain heightened and lurid.  The dialogue is consistently completely idiotic and revolves around terrible puns.  There's a lot of clumsy slapstick.  Curiously, except for a minute or so of off-color (and homophobic) jesting, the film is completely chaste and conforms to the limitations of sit-com TV in the 1960's.  The viewer experiences the curious feeling of continuously disappointed expectations endemic to watching sit-coms in the era and, even, through the mid-eighties -- scenes are set up for something terrible or disturbingly violent or erotic to occur, but TV standards and practices always thwart the viewers' prurient desires.  Nothing really violent or sexual can be shown and, so, these shows operate on the basis of audience desires that are endlessly deferred.  Zombie's ambition is to replicate the sensibility that animated the Munsters and other shows of its kind (Batman and The Addams Family as well as Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie) and he mostly succeeds.  But whether this is an objective worthy of being achieved is unclear to me -- why exactly would you want to precisely imitate dreck that was wholly disposable when it was made more than fifty years ago?  In this regard, the movie has a distinctly avant-garde flavor -- it's single-mindedly pursues objectives that are pointless although dauntingly difficult to achieve.  After all, there's been a lot of "water over the dam" since 1965. 

The picture is spectacular.  The colors are bright to the point of producing head-aches.  Many of the film's big productions sequences are startlingly well-staged.  For example, when Herman marries Lily, she is brought to the chapel -- in a graveyard -- of course, in a spectacular white hearse with roaring gilded lions on its side.  She emerges from her cream-colored casket in diaphanous white mermaid robes and her bridal veil is decorously lifted by big, mouse-faced bats.  The vows are pronounced by a cartoon-style robot, apparently made of square pieces of cardboard, and Butch Patrick, who played Eddie in 1965, provides the voice-over.  When the robot has completed the vows, he bursts into flames and Lily says "Better call 911" -- Herman mutters "Car 54 where are you?" referencing an earlier TV series in which Fred Gwynne and Al Lewis performed together as feckless New York cops.  The dialogue is ridiculous and the show has nothing even approaching acting -- the characters just ham it up for the camera.  However, the images are so bizarre and beautiful that, perhaps, the movie could be watched with some pleasure with sound simply turned off.  The movie begins with a rather scary scene in which a monstrous undead composer stalks around -- I don't have any idea what this opening sequence is supposed to mean and it's not convincingly linked to the rest of the movie.  On the evidence of the credits, the film was entirely shot in Hungary, apparently on large sound-stages there and, perhaps, this accounts for some of the movie's rococo aspects.