拉st month, we sawa teaserfor Rob Zombie’s modern take on明斯特的, the other monster sitcom that ran for a couple seasons in the 1960s, coinciding with亚当斯家族(they both aired from 1964-1966, makes you wonder what was in the water around the studio lots at that precise moment).明斯特的—which was inspired by Charles Addams’ original Addams Family cartoons—was a little less biting, less morbid, and more accessible than亚当斯家族, which is why it did better during both shows’ brief run in the mid-60s. But in the long run,亚当斯家族has emerged as the cultural stalwart that gets continually reinvented, from the Barry Sonnenfeld films of the early 1990s, to the current animated films with Oscar Isaac voicing Gomez Addams and Charlize Theron voicing Morticia, to the upcoming Tim Burton Netflix series,Wednesday.
Rob Zombie’s update of明斯特的is the first real attempt to reinvent the Munsters for the modern era. A trailer dropped yesterday, and it looks, um…
Well, if I’m being generous, it looks like maybe Zombie is a fan ofWhat We Do in the Shadows. The lighting is brighter, but the color scheme is similar to what we see onWWDITS. And if I’m being ungenerous, well, this looks terrible. Maybe in its full context, the cheesy tone won’t be so straight-up schlocky, but now my curiosity at Rob Zombie’s take on the Munsters has turned to dread. This reminds me of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp’s take onDark Shadows, a supernatural primetime soap that ran from 1966-1971. The Burton-Depp film reboot in 2012 sought to recapture the Gothic tone of the original TV show, but it failed, critically and commercially. The 1991 television reboot, though, got off to a gangbusters start (only to fail when the Gulf War took over TV sets just days after the show was launched). But initially, the 1991 reboot worked, reimaginingDark Shadowsas a more streamlined romantic fantasy than a monster-of-the-night soap.
That’s the key to rebooting older stories—evolution and reimagining. Art evolves, expression accelerates. You can’t recreate what was done before, it won’t translate to modern sensibilities and audience tastes. You have to reimagine howthenworksnow. That’s what I am missing from明斯特的, that sense of reimagining. It looks like repackaging, now in Technicolor. That is not only not going to be enough, it’s probably going mean this movie is a goddamn mess. Which wouldn’t be a surprise, sometimes Zombie’s movies are messy. But YIKES, this looks rough.
