Gah, I just watched that trailer. First point, half of it looked like an MST3K intro. Second point, if you’re going to go from black and white to color, why would you do it like that? Herman reminds me of the Leto Joker, and not in a good way. EDIT: Third point: Come on man, saying Rob Zombie was the director of Halloween without some sort of qualifying footnote that it wasn’t the original Halloween, that’s just trashy.
Was anything about the Leto Joker good?
I’m the one weird guy that thought he did a pretty good job. As hip-hop drug dealer Joker, I thought he hammed it up appropriately, if not that pleasantly.
Cool.
I mean, how do you follow Heath Ledger’s Joker? I thought he did a better than average job of conveying the psychopathy in a relatively mediocre movie. Once I got past his vocal choice I enjoyed his batshit (intended) enthusiasm.
Very true. Ledger was to the Joker what Ryan Reynolds is to Deadpool. They own the roles.
For some reason I can’t google up the pic where they have the Jokers laid out as the insane one, the gangster, the clown, the trickster, etc. I think Leto did find a new square in that image, which is no small task. Also, he brought a suicidal edge to the character, in the sense of “I have no regard for myself as long as I’m keeping it pegged at 11” that was pretty new.
Bravo!
I actually hadn’t thought of it from that perspective. Not someone who’s actually insane like the usual portrayals of the Joker, but more someone who’s taken a personality a bit far. In that context, it does sort of work. (Whether or not that’s what he was actually going for is another question entirely!)
Higher reviews scores than I expected. Because I expected this to be sitting around 0% LOL
Who on Qt3 will take one for the forum?
Oh, it’s going to Netlfix and not Peacock?
I’ll watch it, because this whole endeavor fascinates me.
I will! And did!
It’s really bad. But not “fun to watch” bad. I figure a movie like this has to be one of two things: either a complete Ed Wood-style farce, or a transgressive The Brady Bunch Movie style masterpiece. But this lands like a slightly less competent update of the formula than the The Munsters Today, which is sort of depressing, given what a dream project this allegedly was for Zombie. This movie is supposed to be a love letter to a show that was pivotal to Rob Zombie’s formation as an artist, but what comes across most about the movie is how little he actually the core element of what makes The Munsters formula work… which is that underneath all of the Universal monster trappings, the original show is actually a pretty typical early-60s family sitcom. But Rob Zombie refuses to engage with that aspect of the Munsters and so the film just becomes a sort of witless rockabilly fever dream.
Basically, if you’ve seen the trailers, you’ve seen the movie: horrible lighting, terrible camera work, witless writing, a plot that is as unnecessary as it is nonsensical, and a cast of Rob Zombie staples all of whom are out of their element. Daniel Roebuck does a passable attempt at Borscht-belt delivery, but he’s not actually funny, largely because the script isn’t funny. Jeff Daniel Philips is a charisma vacuum as Herman Munster, utterly pathetic in every detail. But what surprised me most is how miscast Sherri Moon Zombie was as Lilly. She clearly doesn’t have a comedic bone in her body, and her performance is 100% irritating affectation. Every line is delivered identically: by bulging her eyes, batting her lashes, pitching her voice into an unnatural falsetto, and waving her fingers like feelers around her face. And I feel a bit age-ist for saying this, but the film also doesn’t do her any favors in the costuming department, where she often looks like a post-menopausal baby goth with a Hot Topic gift card.
Despite getting super high before hand and expecting The Munsters to be a laugh riot one way or another, I didn’t so much as crack a smile during the movie. In fact, I found it to be sort of grim, because it reveals in stark terms how inept a filmmaker Rob Zombie actually is when he’s not being propped up by mainstream studio infrastructure. The arm of Universal that produced this film is basically a tax write-off studio that makes films no one asked for like Kindergarten Cop 2 and The Scorpion King 3, and you can really tell that the Hungarian ‘talent’ brought into serve as set designers and cinematographers are porn-level professionals at best. The lack of faith Universal had in Zombie here is palpable in every aspect of marketing, budget, and production, but my favorite detail is this: despite the fact that it is owned by their own label, Universal clearly denied Zombie the right to use his own Munsters-themed song, Dragula, in the Munsters soundtrack. That’s an amazing burn for a project like this.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
It’s a pass from me:
Thanks for taking one for the team, Dr. Sepulchre. And especially thanks for the thorough and thoroughly entertaining write up!
As the movie started, I harbored secret hope that maybe this would be the tone where Zombie finally finds his voice, where we discover that all along he just wanted to do comedy. Maybe Rob Zombie was finally coming home?
Of course, no such thing happened and I stopped watching in disgust after about thirty minutes. I just couldn’t take it. So painfully bad. The nicest thing I can say about what little I saw of The Munsters that I didn’t hate the actor playing the Nosferatu out on a date with Sherri Moon Zombie.
That is a fantastic review. Should be up on rotten tomatoes and IMDb. Thanks for saving me from wasting 2 hours of my life.
Oh God. I just watched The Munsters.
The one thing I’ll give it is the audio is much better than the sound in the trailer. I assume Rob Zombie/Universal just used un-looped on-set sound in the trailer for some reason.
This was the main issue really. Again, I’m not a huge Munsters fan, and I’ve never thought the old show was all that good, but this was just so blah. I get that Zombie was trying to emulate the show’s 60’s era tone, but he got it all wrong. It’s the hammy corniness of an old school kiddie-friendly family sitcom minus the amusement and instead slathered in dirty neon, Dutch angles, and Sheri Moon Zombie’s cackling.