Munster, Go Home!

Ill Manors

Munster, Go Home!
Directed by Earl Bellamy
USA 1966
Universal Zone B Blu Ray

A week or two before filming began on Munster, Go Home!,  the first (and last) film to feature the majority of the original cast of The Munsters in colour, said cast found out that the show they had been so successful with for the last three years had been cancelled, trounced soundly in the ratings by Batman. But the producers went ahead with the movie hoping this would either gain interest from another studio picking up the show or, who knows, even carry it on as a series of feature films. Alas, the film flopped and so that was the end, for a while, of The Munsters. 

And, although this movie has been on British TV a number of times over the years, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before now (although I have got the soundtrack CD somewhere). 

And it’s… honestly not that great a film and, I think I can almost put my finger on why but, I’ll get to that in a minute. But first, that cast…

So returning form the original show we have Fred Gwynne as the Frankenstein’s monster-like Herman Munster, Yvonne De Carlo as his vampiric wife Lily Munster, Al Lewis as the Dracula based Grandpa Munster and Butch Patrick as son Eddie Munster. And… um… Debbie Watson as the glamorous Marilyn Munster. Yeah, that’s right, regular Marilyn Pat Priest was effectively fired from the role because Universal wanted to try and build up Watson as a new star. I don’t think it worked out for either of them.

Rounding out the cast, which is set in England after Herman inherits the Munster estate in England and becomes Lord Munster, are the great Terry Thomas, Hermione Gingold and John Carradine. 

And there are all kinds of high comedy shenanigans, first on the ship over to England and then in the English village... where Marilyn gets a love interest in a rival family, a counterfeiting operation is discovered in the cellars of the house and Herman has to dodge the assassination attempts of a family member and come first in a drag race (driving his coffin turned into a car Drag-u-la! Hmm.).

And it’s not great. To show Terry Thomas is a relative of Herman, they have him throwing Herman-like Tantrums and acting quite childishly and… yeah… I got the feeling that the Americans almost but, not quite, knew what Thomas was about. It certainly doesn’t sit well when he breaks into this stuff and kinda lowers the tone of the movie, I felt. 

But the worst thing about this one, I think, is that the story and even some of the gags are not badly performed… but they seem to be executed in a way that is just a little over the top and written for a TV audience, it seemed to me. It’s almost like extra pauses have been given between the jokes to wait for the canned laughter to kick in (which is why I’d probably hate the show if I were ever to revisit it in so called adulthood… I hate laughter tracks). So things seem a little mistimed and just a little too broad for a big screen environment, as far as I'm concerned. 

All that being said, Jack Marshall’s score is serviceable (although, good luck if you are waiting for him to make really good use of the main theme tune arrangement which used to open the show), the colours are often beautiful - Grandpa’s lab in greens and reds gets ‘full on Bava’, for example - and there’s enough going on to hold the interest. Plus my mum really liked it and so I can’t judge it too badly, as I bought it to watch with her in mind. It just wasn’t really for me, in the end… although I’m sure I would have loved it if I’d seen it as a kid. 

There’s even a nice metatextual nod in a scene where Herman and Grandpa need to raise help and Herman yells out, “Car 54 Where Are You?”. Of course, Fred Gwynne and Al Lewis were the stars of the show Car 54 Where Are You? prior to starring in The Munsters, so, yeah, that would have meant more to audiences at the time I suspect (though I pointed at the screen when Herman shouted this).

All in all, Munster, Go Home! is something of a novelty movie and, though I could see myself sitting through it again in another decade or so, it’s not really one I’d recommend to many people whose age is in double digits. Which might possibly have been the point although, I suspect this one was aimed directly at a teenage audience. This one didn’t quite do it for me.