I got really excited for a moment when I learned Rob Zombie (director "House of 1000 Corpses") was making a new film based on the classic "The Munsters" television program from the 1960s.

And then I watched the trailer:

You can see by looking at the trailer that it at least started as a passion project. The cast appears to be energetic and deeply invested in representing the original characters and their actors with great honor and reverence. The sets appear pretty elaborate and probably the stuff of fantasy for the crew of the original series. However, one problem that's apparent from the moment Rob Zombie's more previous films roll on the screen until the very end of the trailer is a seemingly complete lack of production value.

Truthfully, I thought this trailer was a joke when it started with crediting Rob Zombie for "Halloween". Rob Zombie was behind the critically panned 2007 remake of John Carpenter's original 1978 "Halloween." But no, this is real. Real unfortunate.

I suppose supporters of the film (even if that's just the cast and crew) would say the editing and filming was just attempting to be true to the original look and feel of the television show. If that was true, "The Munsters" should have been released as a Made for TV (or streaming) feature. It also means it should have been published entirely in black and white.

Instead, by using vibrant color, the film looks like another direct-to-video-quality disaster akin to "Home Sweet Home Alone". As Fangirlish notes in her review of the Home Alone remake, "Nostalgia is clearly the point of this film’s existence as well."

"The Munsters" appears might even be worse than "Home Sweet Home Alone" because they're trying to recapture the same campiness of the 1960s television show.

While there are undoubtedly die-hard Munsters fans, there aren't enough of them to make a film like this profitable.

Rob Zombie would have been better off taking a darker, grittier take on the Munsters while maintaining some comedic themes from the show without trying to replicate the entire series in full HD and color. Using high contrast, unsaturated colors, and avoiding the fast-forward video gag would help make the film feel more serious and scary. Instead of focusing on how the Munsters met, focus instead of the Munsters immigrating to the United States in the 1960s, perhaps even to avoid a comic stereotype of a Communist regime in Eastern European Transylvania to reinforce the timeline. The Munsters then would work AMAZINGLY as a critique of how Americans tend to accept the customs and traditions of immigrants.

As we all know, what works for TV does not work on the big screen. On top of that, what made audiences laugh in the 1960s is almost certainly not enough to entertain audiences in the 2020s. The really sad thing about this pending disaster is that it's likely to damage "The Munsters" franchise so badly that it will be another 20 or 30 years until another director tries doing something more serious with it again (think about how long it took for studios to treat Batman seriously for the 1989 film after the goofy 1966 Batman made the character a joke). The Munsters is a great franchise with a lot of potential in its premise. It just needed a visionary better than Rob Zombie at the helm.

Of course, I could be wrong, and "The Munsters" could be the film of the decade. But I think everyone knows that I'm right.