The fiftysomething son of Muppets creator Jim Henson, Brian
Henson may have thought everybody would laugh hysterically at the sight of his
father’s “Sesame Street” Muppets wallowing in puppet sex, killing other puppets,
and spewing R-rated “Scarface” obscenities.
Indeed, the production company behind “Sesame Street” sued STX Films for
an early poster displaying the tagline: “No Sesame, All Street.” Mind you, none
of the actual “Sesame Street” Muppet characters are ridiculed in Henson’s
farce. Nevertheless, The Sesame Workshop
argued such advertising “deliberately confuses consumers into mistakenly
believing that Sesame is associated with, has allowed, or has even endorsed or
produced the movie and tarnishes Sesame’s brand.” Judge Vernon Broderick threw the case
out. Although they lost the lawsuit, The
Sesame Workshop must be elated that Henson’ abominable police procedural comedy
“The Happytime Murders” (* OUT OF ****) bombed during its first week in
release. Forging a make-believe world where
“meat sacks” and “felties” bump into each other, this lame laffer earned only a
quarter of its $40-million budget. Puppets refer to humans as “meat sacks,” while
humans call puppets “felties.” Comparisons between “The Happytime Murders” and “Who
Framed Roger Rabbit” (1988), where cartoon characters co-existed with humans are
inevitable. Despite its top-notch CGI of
Muppets ‘behaving badly’ and its celebrity cast, featuring Melissa McCarthy, Maya
Rudolph, and Elizabeth Banks, this predictable, half-baked hokum should have
been called “The Crappytime Murders.” Basically,
neither Henson nor scenarists Todd Berger and Dee Austin Robertson have
conjured up enough sidesplitting jokes to weather its lowest-common-denominator
91 minutes. Moreover, the jokes are
neither shamelessly nor hilariously memorable.
If you’ve seen the trailer where puppets perform “Basic Instinct” sex
and the guy squirts ‘silly-string’ semen, you’ve seen the most provocative scene. Another scene with a Dominatrix Dalmatian
whipping a semi-nude, tied-down fireman while yelping, “I'm gonna piss on you
like a fire hydrant” is more idiotic than erotic.
This whodunit takes place in the seedy underbelly of contemporary
Los Angeles. Mankind has marginalized puppets
as second-class citizens, and the filmmakers cannot resist exposing the racism with
which humans belittle puppets. The action concerns the puppets who starred in “The
Happytime Gang,” a popular 1990’s kiddie show. Humans embraced this groundbreaking
sit-com about puppets, and puppets attracted greater sympathy from humans. Decades afterward, the lucrative syndication
rights for the show are up for grabs. Now,
a serial slayer is stalking and knocking-off the seven puppet cast members one-by-one. Lieutenant Banning of the LAPD (Leslie David
Baker of “Elizabethtown”) assigns former police detective Phil Phillips (long-time
Muppeteer vet Bill Barretta) to serve as a consultant for his former partner,
Detective
Connie Edwards (Melissa McCarthy of “Identity Thief”), to solve these
homicides. Traces of bad blood linger
between Phil and Connie. For the record,
Phil is a sky-blue Muppet with black hair who resembles former “Late Late Show”
talk host Tom Synder, and he doesn’t mind kicking the crap out of anybody. Phil was a rising star in the LAPD, until a
pistol-packing puppet took Connie hostage in a stand-off. Phil fired at the perpetrator, but his bullet
ricocheted and killed an innocent bystander. Connie caught a slug in the liver when she
disarmed her truculent captor.
Desperately, Phil rushed her to the nearest medical facility, and it
turned out to be a puppet hospital. Although
the puppet doctor refused to operate on a human, Phil waved the muzzle of his
service revolver under his nose. Since acquiring
a felt liver, Connie contends with many of the afflictions puppets suffer on a
daily basis. Puppets crave sugar as if it were cocaine, and Connie has dozens
of Maple Syrup bottles chilling in her fridge.
Now, Phil ekes out a living as a private investigator. One
day, switch-hitting, nympho puppet Sandra White (Dorien Davies) slinks into his
office. She hires Phil to thwart blackmailers
demanding $350-thousand from her. The
first place Phil heads is a smut shop.
He is trying to trace the cut-out letters in the blackmail note to a porno
magazine. Meantime, a masked gunman enters
the store, kills the owner and his two employees, who were staging a porno
about an octopus milking a slutty dairy cow with his tentacles. The gunman blows their felt heads off with a
shotgun. BLAM! BLAM! During
this blazing mayhem, Phil occupied himself in the smut owner’s office, scrutinizing
a list of suspects who might have clipped letters from the porno magazine for Sandra’s
blackmail message. Nevertheless, the
LAPD treat Phil as ‘a person of interest’ despite his story that he heard
nothing in the owner’s office. Now, Phil
is on the lam, and Connie is struggling to protect him, while they ferret out clues
to the identities of the killers.
Comparably, “The Happytime Murders” isn’t nearly as rude,
crude, and offensive as Peter Jackson’s “Meet the Feebles” (1989), Trey
Parker’s “Team America: World Police” (2004), and Seth MacFarlane’s two “Ted”
comedies with Mark Walhberg. Mind you,
the prospect of a “Happytime Murders” sequel is probably as infinitesimal as “Ted
3.” Sadly, Henson and his writers provide
a far from adequate history about the origins of this strange new world where puppets
talk. Principally, when did the Muppets
become sentient? Sure, these questions may
not bother you, but some explanation should have been offered. We watch puppets play cards, orchestrate
drive-by shootings, and generally act like criminals. Puppet die violently in this murder-riddled
melodrama. Bullets blow the stuffing out of these puppets when dogs aren’t mistaking
them for chew toys. The puppet work is probably some of the best. Publicity material for “The Happytime Murders”
reveals that Henson and company fashioned about 125 Muppet-like puppets for it. Indeed, the interaction between the actors
and the puppets looks appropriately goofy.
While she is cast as the top-billed detective, Melissa McCarthy plays
second banana to Phil. Maya Rudolph steals every scene as Phil’s radiant secretary
‘Bubbles’ who can pick locks. Neither trailblazing nor sharp-edged enough as a
satire, “The Happytime Murders” scrapes the bottom of the barrel with little to
show for it.
