Meet The Feebles Review

Meet The Feebles
Heidi The Hippo, the star of the Meet The Feebles Variety Hour discovers her husband Bletch, The Walrus is cheating and with all the world waiting for the show the assorted co-stars must contend with their own problems.

by Kim Newman |
Published on
Release Date:

01 Jan 1989

Running Time:

94 minutes

Certificate:

18

Original Title:

Meet The Feebles

Peter Jackson,The Lord of the Rings and King Kong Helmer's follow up movie to the Zombie-fest Bad Taste, here takes a satirical chainsaw to the Muppets in a really bizarre, tasteless peek backstage at the last night of the Feebles Variety Show, during which the perky foam rubber animals’ clean-cut image takes a severe bashing.

Robert the Hedgehog, an innocent young chorus boy just recruited to the troupe, is shocked to discover that impresario Bletch the Walrus is spurning the love of two-ton diva Heidi the Hippo and dabbling in drug dealing while having sex with Samantha the Cat and making all-Feeble porno movies in the basement. Meanwhile, Sid the Elephant fights a paternity suit brought against him by a chicken groupie, Harry the Hare suffers from the dreaded sexually-transmitted disease that begins with the letter M, a gay Basil Brush-ish fox sings a song about how much he enjoys sodomy, and a Kermit look-alike knife-thrower is a heroin addict thanks to his traumatic experiences at the hands of Vietcong chipmunks.

All the while, a muckraking fly reporter is buzzing around trying to get the dirt on everyone and tucking into any tasty turds he finds in the toilet. Performed by an all-rubber cast, this deserves points for perversion, but somehow the original notion of The Muppet Show (that puppets have private lives and aren’t quite up to putting on a second-rate variety show) is far more subversive than the Viz comics frill, (that the puppets’ private lives are really repulsive) Jackson adds here.

No matter how depraved the new-minted Feebles might be, they still aren’t quite as deeply strange as the Great Gonzo, Miss Piggy or Animal are when you think about them.

Like Bad Taste, it has a slender idea which has to be padded out in the middle with a repetitive fight scene, and suffers from the thinness of its “ordinary” characters, but there is also an undeniable sick delight to be found in the more extreme moments.
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