DVD REVIEW: THE MUNSTERS COMPLETE COLLECTION

Shane | 5 October 2016 | Reply

DVD REVIEW: THE MUNSTERS COMPLETE COLLECTION
Shock Entertainment
August 2016
Reviewed by Shane Pinnegar
8 ½ /10

Debuting in the same week in September 1964, and running concurrently with The Addams Family (Bewitched also premiered that week) for twenty months, The Munsters featured a very similar plot line – a creepy horror family who think they are perfectly normal, living in mainstream suburbia.

The series starred Fred Gwynne as the Frankenstein-like Herman Munster and the ravishing Yvonne de Carlo as his vampire wife Lily, Al Lewis as Grandpa (also a vampire) and Butch Patrick as their werewolf son Eddie. Niece Marilyn (played by Beverley Owen for the first thirteen episodes, and Pat Priest thereafter) is a normal, cheesecake-beautiful girl next door who thinks she is ugly compared to the family she loves.

This spectacular box set contains all seventy episodes of the series, as well as the 1981 feature film The Munsters Revenge, and Here Come The Munsters from 1995.

Full of retro laughs galore, The Munsters is retro in every way – especially the early episodes which are in black and white and whose quality isn’t always up to modern standards fifty years later. There’s also some documentaries and one colourised episode which is unusual, to say the least, for those of us used to only ever having seen the show in black & white.

The secret to the success of the show – as with that of The Addams Family – is the casting, with the leads playing their supernatural differences pretty much straight, and highlighting the shallowness of ‘polite society’ in the process. Great stuff.