Meet the Feebles mocks Muppets, movies

Puppet porn, drugs, violence come to big screen

Peter Jackson's totally warped and dark yet enchanting Meet the Feebles brings the Muppets into modern film, exploding with sex, drugs and violence. From Heidi the well-endowed hippo to the knife-throwing, war veteran, junkie alligator to Sidney, the elephant father of a half-chicken baby, the Feebles are "not your average, ordinary people."

As the puppet cast prepares for its live, televised show, blow jobs, drug deals and slaughter abound, amid colorful bodily fluids. The director is a fox who sings a tribute to sodomy. The producer is a walrus named Bletch who eats a sequined guppy mid-audition. Heidi, the show's star, eats out a pastry store in a fit of depression.

The few innocents include hedgehog Wobert, an aspiring performer, poodle Lucille, the hedgehog's love and Arthur, the sympathetic worm who encourages Wobert to serenade Lucille with a flamenco song.

When zany, unbalanced, absurd characters come together to put on a show, chaos inevitably ensues. Harry, the rabbit announcer, is told by his doctor that he has a venereal disease and few hours to live. The knife thrower suffers from withdrawal, throughout the film, at one point delving into his past to relate his capture and torture in Vietnam, finally getting a fix in the bathroom.

Bletch allows Heidi to sleep her way into his production but later finds a younger, thinner cat to service him. Unable to accept being replaced, Heidi refuses to perform and overeats to compensate for lack of love.

Replacing a cockroach, an anteater gets hauled into a porn movie, Anal Antics, with a cow but cannot rise to the occasion until the director tells him, "Get aroused" and hands him underwear to sniff. When a snake-charming meditator contorts himself and gets his head caught in his ass, someone suggests the sketch title "Passage to India."

This film fits snugly in that genre of entertainment about entertainment, as it turns the Muppets upside down and metaphorically vomits on them. The system is fundamentally corrupt. The powerful characters have self-serving, self-destructive lifestyles while the weak characters either earnestly love performing or deviously try to get ahead by bringing others down.

Bletch, along with his cohorts, a bulldog and a warthog, absconds while everyone else works, to play golf and deal drugs. Later, the lowlife rat Trevor tries taking advantage of Bletch, substituting Borax for cocaine, but the anteater snorts a line and discovers the lie. The rat is forced to eat Borax and is subsequently "liquidated."

Before his final meltdown, Trevor drugs Lucille so he can sleep with her, Wobert walks in and misinterprets the situation, later telling her, "You're loose and you dwink." Eventually his love outweighs his suspicions and he confirms their engagement.

There is the failed suicide and the successful killing rampage that recall the typical gratuitous violence of the current Hollywood trend, which occur too close to the end to be detailed.

The puppets in their eerily familiar, disturbed world, are captivating. When they finally go live, the show within the show is not intriguing so much for its own sake but for what goes awry on and off the stage. The knife thrower loses track of his tosses and accidentally sends a blade plummeting into his skull. Harry vomits profusely.

The killing rampage, however, unequivocally ties the film to Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, as almost everyone dies in mass confusion on live TV, for the whole world to see. Both movies comment on today's grim definition of entertainment, that sex, drugs and violence sell.

Where Meet the Feebles differs from Killers, however, is that the characters are not human. They are anthropomorphized animal puppets, though with human problems of greed, addiction and sketchy ethics.

Meet the Feebles provides several layers of entertainment. Watching puppets that recall "Sesame Street" utter profanities and engage in a myriad of illicit behavior is cause for laughter. The design of the creatures and the complexity of their lives stimulate appreciation. The greater comment on what entertainment is adds depth.

Meet the Feebles is undeniably a crazy, twisted albeit amusing parody of the Muppets and, according to the ending credits, "no puppets were killed or maimed during the production of this film."