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.
