Rent Meet the Feebles (1989)

Muppets Behaving Badly - Meet the Feebles review by Count Otto Black

Like "Fritz The Cat" two decades earlier, this is a one-joke film: it looks like a kids' movie, but it's full of sex, drugs, swearing, and extreme violence. Plus every gag they could think of in which somebody gets sprayed with somebody else's body fluids. Viewers of a certain age may find it hysterically funny that the main female character looks and sounds like Miss Piggy, apart from being a hippopotamus rather than a pig, has an eating disorder, and runs amuck with a machine-gun at the end. Which isn't a spoiler, since the image is right there on the packaging, and anyway, this movie barely has a plot. Oh, and there's a frog who is clearly meant to be Kermit, and guess what: he's a junkie! Hardy har har!

Viewers with a more sophisticated sense of humour will probably find the whole mess wearisome, while watching it with a kind of horrified fascination. The combination of visual inventiveness with the feeling that the director in some ways has a mental age of ten makes this film Peter Jackson's "Howard The Duck", and strongly suggests that, like George Lucas, if he strays too far from the franchise that made his name, he'll go down the toilet. As one character in this movie literally does. After eating somebody else's excrement. In close-up. With a spoon.

If you find the concept of a puppet rabbit with HIV vomiting all over several other puppets amusing, you're gonna love this! If you have the intelligence to notice that almost none of the jokes would be funny if they were performed by human actors, you might not enjoy it so much. And what more obvious indication that a movie is bloody awful can there be than an extended and totally irrelevant spoof of some other movie that was a recent hit when it came out? In this case, junkie Kermit has a dig at "The Deer Hunter" for no reason other than to pad out the running time, because the writers couldn't think of enough jokes about a star-studded TV variety show going disastrously wrong to fill an hour and a half.

This truly is the pits. It's not even a good print. I guess the distributors cared about this film only slightly more than I did. If you think the idea of a trashy American TV show breaking all bounds of taste and decency before going stratospherically weird has comic potential, and you'd like to see an 18 certificate movie based on this concept, I have four words to say to you: "Jerry Springer: The Opera". That's intelligent satire which goes much further than this childish effort does, and is genuinely funny. If on the other hand, your style is more "haw haw, the puppet said a bad word, then it done a great big wee on the other puppet's head, haw haw haw!", this is undoubtedly your idea of a five-star film. Good luck with that.