Long before he took the world by storm with his Lord of the Rings trilogy and made epic cinema big and sexy again, Kiwi director Peter Jackson specialised in decidedly oddball pictures geared heavily toward grossing his audiences out, and none of his films accomplished this with quite as much perverse panache as Meet The Feebles, a savagely affectionate (or affectionately savage) pastiche of Jim Henson's The Muppets. Alas, Meet The Feebles is also one of Jackson's lesser-known films - it bombed on release in 1989 and only gained a halfway substantial amount of attention after Lord of The Rings made Jackson a household name - which maybe isn't so surprising given how unashamedly esoteric it is. Whether or not you enjoy this film might depend on how much tolerance you have for seeing puppet animals barf and take big heavy leaks on one another, how open-minded you are toward interspecies sex (an element which is suggested wholesale by the Muppets themselves, mind) or how much of a masochistic sicko you are in general. If you pass that test, then it's a must-see.
The first thing to note is that Meet The Feebles is nothing like Avenue Q, a Broadway musical which also functioned as an adult-orientated pastiche on Henson, more specifically Sesame Street. For all its sauciness, Avenue Q was imbued with a warmth and tenderness toward its characters which Meet The Feebles goes well out of its way to avoid. Instead, Meet The Feebles uses the inhuman, otherworldly qualities of the Muppets as the stuff of horror, making you feel as if you're watching an alien race put on a play about humankind's very worst vices - there is something slickly Aesopian about the entire affair, with the sheer, unabashed ugliness of the puppetry giving physical form to that depravity. That's how I see it, anyway. Speaking as someone who was raised on Henson properties but also saw something weirdly grotesque and threatening in their fuzzy felt faces as a child, I have a boundless appreciation for Jackson's demented vision. Meet The Feebles is a film which speaks to the little kid in me who was once too scared to watch Fraggle Rock because the bit in the opening sequence where Junior Gorg seizes Gobo was hella spine-chilling (nowadays, I love Fraggle Rock and the deep irony is that Junior Gorg is my favourite character) and who was deathly afraid of anything involving Miss Piggy for not knowing when her violent temper might erupt. I can only assume that Jackson felt an inkling of that fear himself, and yearned to create a picture that carried that Muppety uncanniness out to its absolute extreme. All in all, I see the film less as the darkly gruesome black comedy it's typically pegged for, and more as the most disorientating, doggedly grotesque of horror films. I don't think I'm alone on that, for Halliwell's Film Guide has it listed a "semi-pornographic horror with Muppet-like creatures that is determined to offend." (Not so sure about the "semi-pornographic" angle, though - yes, there's a truck-load of fairly graphic sight gags involving interspecies bonking, but it's no more pornographic in practice than was Ralph Bakshi's Fritz The Cat. As for the film's potential to offend, ironically I'd say that the most offensive thing happens essentially by accident and involves the two characters we're supposed to see as the most wholesome).
Meet The Feebles is an absolute freak show of a flick that sets out to immerse the viewer in as intensely uncomfortable an experience as possible. The close-up shots of those mangy, moth-eaten puppets are so frightfully, monstrously surreal that it transcends into the kind of nightmarish fever dream territory that has you wailing out in disbelief at what you're seeing. It's such a bizarrely unique piece of film-making that a number of critics were left stumped by it - the Time Out review gave props to the obvious craft that went into the puppetry and song-writing but questioned if it was worth the effort when it was ultimately in service of "a string of gags about vomiting, pissing, shitting, jissom pressure, bunnilingus, and knicker-sniffing anteaters?" Meet The Feebles revels in everything that's gross and nasty about the human condition, including its assorted bodily functions, and inevitably that's going to alienate a few people. In many respects I think that Meet The Feebles was a bit ahead of its time - in a post-South Park world its combination of absurdity and extreme gross-out vulgarity doesn't seem quite so out there, but then film's unapologetic commitment to its own hypnotic ugliness takes it down an altogether darker, creepier path than Parker and Stone's infamous creation. Meet The Feebles was never destined to be anything other than fringe viewing, and it's essential that you approach it with an already very twisted demeanor.
Meet The Feebles follows the assorted exploits of a troupe of sleazy animal performers as they prepare to put on a big variety show in the hopes of landing a syndicated television series. Their two biggest draws are Harry (Ross Jolly), a sexually promiscuous leporine, and hippopotamus diva Heidi (voiced by Mark Hadlow, with Danny Mulheron providing her physical movements), who's instantly recognisable as the troupe's answer to Miss Piggy. If you thought that Kermit and Piggy's relationship seemed a bit rocky at times, that's nothing compared to the emotionally tortured nightmare that is Heidi's partnership with her boss and lover Mr. Bletch (Peter Vere-Jones), the villainous walrus manager of the club (funnily enough my VHS copy of the film identifies him as an otter, but no, I'd say those tusks are a dead giveaway). While the Feebles are rehearsing their big opening number, Bletch is in his office aggressively banging his feline mistress Samantha (Donna Akersten). Words cannot describe just how eye-poppingly bizarre it is seeing this big hefty walrus going at it with this tiny, fragile-looking cat (I'm not sure, but I think this may have been the original Hot Skitty on Wailord Action). Bletch has secretly lost whatever pull he once felt toward Heidi but is reluctant to drop her altogether due to her importance to the show. Samantha tires of Bletch's stalling and tries to undo Heidi herself with some backstage cattiness that has Heidi retreating to her dressing room in a cake-binging dejection. Her despair eventually transforms into a Miss Piggy-style rage that reaches breathtakingly murderous heights. In the meantime, Bletch has his flippers tied with other concerns, such a shady drugs deal with a golf-playing pig (Stuart Devenie), and producing the underground porn films directed by his best mate Trevor the rat (Brian Sergent), which feature a cow with oversized udders indulging in S&M activities with a whip-wielding weta. I did tell you this thing was offbeat.
The other major story thread involves the troupe's newcomer, a chivalrous but naive and painfully shy hedgehog named Robert (Hadlow) whose excitement at the mere prospect of being featured in the Feebles line up soon begins to grate on the rest of the crew, particularly the pretentious vulpine director Sebastian (Devenie). Fortunately, Robert finds a friendly mentor in theatre veteran Arthur the worm (Vere-Jones) and a potential love interest in pretty chorus girl poodle Lucille (Akersten). Robert's innocence and playful enthusiasm stand in direct contrast to the sheer depravity unfolding all around him and is presumably intended to provide the film with some form of emotional catharsis - a small dash of earnestness so that not even a world as mangy and flea-bitten as the Feebles' is entirely devoid of sunshine. After all, the film clearly intends for the viewer to sympathise with Robert and root for his sweet sincerity to win the day (even when it also expects us to laugh at his speech impediment). Unfortunately, Robert's so-called virtue also winds up yielding the film's most problematic element - the cute little hedgehog turns out to be frankly a bit of a judgemental twat, as evidenced when he catches Trevor in the process of drugging and raping Lucille (hoping to lure her into his underground porn ring) and is swift to blame and shame the victim. Underneath all that cat-banging, drugs running and underpants-sniffing, Meet The Feebles is actually a surprisingly black-and-white morality story, so searingly condemning in its exploration of human vice that it again feels like the work of an alien race passing a very harsh judgement on the failings of humanity; among them, its weakness for a little tipple. Lucille gets raped by Trevor and rebuffed by Robert because she loosens her morals just enough to accept a glass of champagne from the former, and regrettably the film seems to regard the outcome as nothing less than her inevitable comeuppance for giving in to the devil's drink (and the lure of potential celebrity) in the first place. Later, when she tries to explain the situation to Robert, he dismisses her for her wine-drinking every bit as much as her ostensible promiscuity. "You dwink", he sneers, and refuses to hear her out. Even the love-conquers-all direction their arc finally takes doesn't quite offset the sourness of this plot point. It's a sourness of a different, entirely less delectable ilk to the pickled-in-piss ugliness that dominates the rest of the film.
There are a handful of smaller story strands, including one involving Harry contracting a mysterious, potentially fatal venereal disease and attempting to fend off an intrusive paparazzi housefly (Sergent) with an insatiable taste for dirt (figuratively and literally - the fly provides the film with possibly its most revolting visual joke, and that's certainly saying something). In another subplot clearly inspired by Gonzo and Camilla from The Muppets, we have a chicken named Sandy (Devenie) attempting to slap Sid the elephant (Mark Wright) with a paternity suit because he refuses to acknowledge their freakish chimera offspring as his own. This is interspersed with Sebastian's efforts to direct the all-important show, which keeps threatening to fall apart due to the cast's tendency to kill, injure or otherwise incapacitate themselves.
The narrative zips continuously from one demented escapade to another, its twisted energy deriving from how consistently the tone threatens to tip over from the crass and menacing into the outright bone-chilling. A prime example would be during the scene where Madame Bovine, the porn star cow, accidentally kills her weta co-star by sitting on him. Trevor shrugs it off, suggesting they can sell the footage as a snuff film, then proceeds to feed the crushed weta carcass to a monstrous, tremor-like lifeform that just so happens to be lurking down in the theatre basement (like, what the hell is that thing?! Are you going to explain it to me, movie?). Special acknowledgement goes to Peter Dasent's low-key score, which really emphasises the sinister, uneasy undercurrent that permeates the film. The puppetry is obviously cruder and more limited than what a Jim Henson production could have accomplished, but it's still pulled off with a remarkable slickness and incorporates some joyously mind-bending set-pieces, one of the high points being a sequence in which Bletch and Trevor face off against a giant spider (which is way cooler than when Sean Astin did it in Return of The King) and then take on a cetacean crime boss by driving their vehicle directly through his viscera. Whether or not you're won over by the film's warped sense of humor, it's hard to not come away with an overwhelming sense of admiration for just how determinedly different it is, how thoroughly it believes in its own nauseating vision, in going all-out to milk as much devilish lunacy as it possibly can within its technical limitations, and how little it evidently cared about delivering a commercial product. It's that real sense of love and commitment toward its vulgar craft that gives Feebles its heart and soul, and enables it to endure as such a wicked curiosity, one that's aged more gracefully than Bakshi's Fritz The Cat, and certainly has more to recommend it than that one-joke wonder Sausage Party. It's the kind of malfunctioning fairground ride that might have you up-chucking every bit as violently as Harry does during one of the musical numbers, but by god, you can't help but marvel at its moxie.
The film's underpinnings as a pitiless morality story come to a head at the climax where - spoilers - Heidi loses every last shred of self-restraint and resorts to machine-gunning the rest of the troupe in a murderous rampage. She comes down on them like the belated judgement of a higher power that's grown weary of their antics and has resorted to pulverizing their vice-ridden hides in a bloodbath of apocalyptic proportions, and it's surely not a coincidence that it's mainly the "nicer" Feebles who are spared her wrath - Robert, Lucille, Arthur, Sid (who does the right thing eventually) and Sebastian (a bit of an anomaly, but then he's not quite as horrible as some of the others). Above all, Feebles is keen to emphasise the importance of living cleanly and not succumbing to the temptations of hedonism, addictive substances and empty celebrity, lest you get done in by a machine gun-wielding hippopotamus. An appropriately maniacal finale to this most singular of pictures or a heavy-handed betrayal of the film's anarchic, free-wheeling spirit? Frankly I'm left too scarred for life to give a damn.
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