Revisiting Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles, one of the most MESSED up puppet movies ever!
Meet the Feebles is a movie that defies description. Calling it a “pure” horror movie is misleading, but calling it anything else doesn’t quite fit, either. It’s a film in the same unclassifiable category as Eraserhead or Pink Flamingos. Maybe calling it beyond horror, or fourth dimensional horror, or horror beyond comprehension is the best way to put it — it’s so horrific, you almost forget it’s horrific and accept its bizarreness as the mundane.
It’s so easy to call Meet the Feebles “The Muppets on a really, really bad acid trip” and call it a day. But that’s not giving the movie a fair shake. Yes, a lot of the impact of Meet the Feebles is purely visual — aesthetically, it’s an amazing looking movie, with terrific lighting and some absolutely phenomenal looking set design. But there’s more nuance and depth to the film than you might think. It at least hits upon a lot of hot button issues, including a few that weren’t really commonplace in horror movies circa 1989. It’s a reflection of the late 1980s in all its worts and boils — and if you’re shocked or disgusted, well, that’s the point.
Watching Meet the Feebles today, it’s hard to envision its director becoming a best director Oscar recipient a mere 15 years later. This is Peter Jackson at his most unhinged and unleashed, and that’s saying something. It’s even rougher around the edges than Bad Taste and more viscerally disgusting than Dead Alive. But it’s a more intelligent and thought-provoking film than either of those flicks (which, for the record, we all love and adore.) Meet the Feebles, as over the top as it may be, is still a valid commentary on its time. It’s probably the closest Jackson has gotten to making a “message” movie, even if that message is a little hard to parse out amidst all of the feces, vomit and blood explosions.
On a very superficial level the movie is a hard, HARD R parody of all of the Muppets movies of the ‘80s. Only in the world of Meet the Feebles, instead of Kermit the Frog singing about rainbow connections, we’ve got a sex-addicted rabbit version of Johnny Carson succumbing to AIDS. And that’s actually one of the more tasteful subplots in the film.
It’s hard to pick a most outrageous dynamic of Meet the Feebles. Is it the subplot about a Vietnam veteran who gets his legs hacked off by Maoist beavers (who, naturally, are depicted in an unflinchingly racist, stereotypical manner) and becomes a hopeless heroin addict? Maybe it’s the subplot about an ingenue poodle getting date raped by an evil show business insider? Or maybe it’s all of the jokes about illegal, underground pornography movies, or the cocaine dealing walruses, or the absurdly racist caricatures in the jazz club scene … really, you can just pick any element of this movie at random and it’s probably going to piss you off.
But it’s not just offensive material for the sake of being offensive. Peter Jackson is no edge lord and there’s something resembling a method to his madness here. Is Meet the Feebles actually a thinly veiled criticism of the Hollywood industrial complex, where shadowy, corrupt “businessmen” take advantage of women and exploit the mental illnesses of actors for their personal gain? There’s obviously an anti-sensationalist message to the film; call me crazy, but when you make a movie where the journalism industry is represented by a crap-eating house fly, it’s kinda hard to not interpret that as a statement on the news media.
Probably the most interesting and revelatory thing about the movie is its main character. It’s a total deconstruction of the Miss Piggy mythos and one of the earliest examples I can recall of a mainstream-ish movie porting about an anti-fat shaming message. The film doesn’t revel in the pain and rejection of Heidi the Hippo, a fading starlet who gets kicked to the curb because of her weight issues. The few genuinely sad and emotionally moving moments of the film all involve her dealing with the terrible hand she’s been dealt. There’s even an amazing little moment where she realizes she ate more cake than she intended and has a nervous breakdown. None of this is played for laughs, either — it’s meant to make you feel for her and understand why she does what she does later in the movie.
And yeah, there’s not much of a reason to avoid spoiling a movie that’s almost 40 years old now. Of course Heidi gets her revenge and when she does, it’s hilarious, satisfying and even legitimately terrifying at the same time. You’d think a mass shooting involving people in giant animal costumes would be at least a little surreal, but no, Peter Jackson and pals makes it feel grim and gritty as all hell. That cynicism and darkness makes Meet the Feebles feel unlike anything else out there. It doesn’t take refuge in tongue in cheek humor; there’s nothing playful about this movie at all.
The story is so good that you almost forget how great the costume and puppetry work in this film is. And it’s downright amazing. If you showed this to someone who had no idea what this movie was I doubt they’d think it was something from as far back as 1989. Nothing about the movie looks cheap or chintzy or ironically low budget. It seems like it would be the kitschiest thing ever, but it’s a very glossy looking movie that feels like it has four or five times what it’s actual production budget was. It’s an interesting and rewarding movie to simply look at, even if you have the sound muted (for whatever reason that may be.)
Meet the Feebles is definitely worth going out of your way to catch if you’ve never seen it before. And if it’s been a few years since you’ve seen it, you should probably give it another look and see what your eyeballs missed on the last viewing. It’s obviously not a movie for the easily offended — or even the difficultly offended, for that matter — but it’s a much smarter satire than it’s given credit for.
Oh, and just so you know? The movie is officially canon in the Muppets universe. For real.
