I’m only on the 5th movie out of 100, and I’ve already started asking myself the question, why am I doing this? Is this really just about killing time while in quarantine?
Meet the Feebles was written and directed by Peter Jackson. I just want to mention this before I start to explain the plot of this movie, because it is batshit bananas.
It opens on a musical number, asking the audience to, in fact, Meet the Feebles, a parody version of the Muppets. The song is cheery, and a bunch of different animal puppets are singing and dancing on stage. There is a bunny that pops out of a carrot, sings, and then the carrot shoots off into the sky like a rocket. The most disturbing-looking hippo is lowered from the ceiling and I have to pause the movie because I can’t stop giggling for 2 minutes.
But then I start to realize she has boobs, and they’re massive. And that they have nipples. I only have a second to think, hmmm, that’s an interesting choice… before my eyes are assaulted with the sight of a walrus fucking a cat. And an aardvark is sniffing worn panties. And a rat is rubbing his crotch because he wants to fuck Lucille, who is not, in fact, a loose seal, but a poodle, which is the first of many egregious missteps of this movie.
Then, these little fuzzball puppets get run over by a barrel, and the rat eats their flattened corpses. The rat is filming BSDM porn between a cow and a roach in the back of the theater. There’s a paternity suit between a chicken and an elephant who have the most atrocious chicken/elephant hybrid baby. A fly eats shit out of a toilet There’s a bunny orgy. The bunny then gets AIDS and vomits all over the stage.
The knife-throwing frog has a heroin problem and stabs several puppets during the show. The rat drugs and tries to rape the poodle. The walrus kills a guy by pouring borax down his throat because he tried to sell him bogus cocaine. The rat and the walrus drive a car through a whale’s mouth and exit through the anus. The hippo finds out her pedophile manager boyfriend is cheating on her and she binges on cakes. When he dumps her, she tries to commit suicide and fails, so she takes a machine gun and massacres almost all the cast instead.
It was exhausting to watch this. I’m reminded of a scene from Daria, where Jane posits that puppets can make anything funny.
Jane – I’m telling you, puppets make anything funny. Give me something that isn’t funny.
Daria – Um… a plane crash – into a nuclear power plant.
Jane – Okay. Now, picture the same plane crash, only the cabin is full of screaming puppets flailing their skinny little puppet arms. Funny, right?
Daria – Hmm… maybe. Are they on fire?
Jane – Hmm…
The movie tried so hard to shock its audience that it didn’t bother to wonder if what they were showing was actually funny. Had they done that, they would have only released this 8 minute clip, where the heroin addicted frog relives his Vietnam experience.
The rest of the movie, however, is so boring that having puppets was never going to save it. There is no overarching plot other than rehearsing for a television special and having that go fairly poorly because everyone is fucking insane. All the side plots – the bunny being sick, the hippo getting broken up with, the elephant and the paternity suit, the hedgehog wanting to get married, the frog trying to score smack, the walrus buying drugs – are a bunch of vignettes that do nothing to actually propel anything forward. When everything is so disjointed like this, there ends up being no story. I’m not invested in this production, I don’t want these puppets to succeed. Even worse, I don’t care enough about it to actively root for them to fail. When the movie doesn’t have a solid story or plot, it has to rely on something else to keep the audience entertained, and I’m assuming comedy was the ultimate goal here, because, again, it’s all puppets. Watching someone get assaulted isn’t funny in general, nevertheless when it’s a poodle, so pretty sure it failed there. So, no, Jane, I’m sorry, puppets unfortunately do not make everything funny. This movie is the cinematic equivalent of Garbage Pail Kids.
I don’t even want to discuss the music because it was so forgettable. The one song that made any sort of impression was a fox singing about how he enjoys sodomy. That’s the whole bit. There are butts hanging from the ceiling and I didn’t even laugh.
Now, if this project is a way to distract myself, wouldn’t I want myself to enjoy it? I probably wouldn’t have adhered to a list, or made myself finish any of these movies if I knew they were going to be train wrecks, right? I’m supposed to be bringing positivity into my life since the whole world has gone to shit. I could die, why would I waste my precious moments on earth watching cheap puppets vomit and piss all over everything?
How am I going to use the knowledge I’m obtaining? Do I want to understand cinema more? Will I continue to do this once I can see people again? Will this get easier as I get higher up the list?
Next is Dancer in the Dark, which has Bjork in it. Please let it be good.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks