Back in 1989 – oh, it was a more innocent time! – there was an independent New Zealand film all about puppets having sex and taking drugs and shooting each other with high-powered weapons.
It was called Meet The Feebles, it was directed by Peter Jackson – yes, that one, who did the Lord of the Rings films – and it was a box office flop for a bunch of reasons which could be summed up as “independent film”, “made in New Zealand”, “about puppets having sex and taking drugs and shooting each other with high-powered weapons”.
There’s a lot of this sort of business.
Anyway, flash forward thirty years and Brian Henson – yes, son of Jim and the man who, along with his siblings, has largely steered the Henson ship since his father’s passing – has decided that the world needs more puppet sex and drugs and swearing. And thus we have The Happytime Murders.
The first trailer is screening with Deadpool 2, it’s about a puppet cop solving a bunch of puppet murders as characters from a beloved children’s show get bumped off, and it features human stars Melissa McCarthy, Joel McHale, and Maya Rudolph who, if her other films of late have been any indication, will be the best thing about it by a fairly long chalk.
And yes, it all looks like Sesame Street/Muppets style-puppets because it’s a production of Henson Independent.
And keeping the Muppet connection, the puppet lead character Phil Phillips is performed by Bill Barretta. He’s the puppeteer who does a lot of Jim Henson’s old characters in the contemporary Muppet projects: Rowlf the Dog. Dr Teeth, the Swedish Chef and so on.
Thankfully all those characters are now safely owned by Disney, so you won’t see them being forced into compromising positions in the below trailer:
And we’ll concede that Seth McFarlane’s raunchy stuffed bear comedy Ted was successful enough to warrant a sequel so there’s at least some sort of audience for gross-out humour using cutesy children’s toys.
But even so, we’re willing to bet that it won’t have anything quite as show-stopping as Meet The Feebles‘ climactic musical number…
