No Good Very Bad Movies Countdown 6: The one that's the worst Muppet movie

 

 

Title: The Happytime Murders

What Year?: 2018

Classification: Parody/ Mashup

Rating: Who Cares??? (2/3)

 

As I write this, I’m fresh off a string of reviews of good or at least entertaining movies, including a couple that found their way into this feature. Just in case you were wondering if this means I’m going soft, my projected lineup will be going back to the baddies, especially from the modern era. As it happens, I have one particular film I had thought about on and off that definitely fits the bill as a representation of the worst modern trends while falling into its own very odd subniche. I present The Happytime Murders, an adult Muppet parody from none other than the Jim Henson crew.

Our story begins with a quick introduction to a society where humans coexist with sentient puppets with stuffing in place of guts. But the puppets aren’t happy, marginalized and plagued by crime, substance abuse and intra-ethnic violence. In the midst of it, we meet Phil Phillips, an ex-cop turned private eye based on a single failure we’re going to hear far too much about. When he’s hired for a routine blackmail case, his investigation takes him to the scene of a multiple Muppetcide whose victims include one of the cast of an in-universe Sesame Street/ minstrel show analog called The Happytime Gang. The detective soon realizes that someone is out to wipe out the whole cast of the show, including his own brother. It’s up to him to find the surviving cast before the killer does, and figure out who’s trying to set him up. But to succeed, he’s going to need help from his human ex-partner.

The Happytime Murders was a 2018 film by STX and Henson Alternative, directed by Brian Henson , the son of the late Jim Henson (see The Dark Crystal). The film had reportedly been in development for at least a decade prior to release, with its eventual script credited to Todd Berger. The film starred Bill Barretta performing and voicing Phil and Melissa McCarthy as Connie Edwards, with Elizabeth Banks as Jenny, the Happytime Gang’s only human cast member. Other crew for the puppets included Kevin Clash and Drew Massey, performing as Bumblypants and Vinny in a porn shop sequence. The film was a commercial failure, earning an estimated world-wide box office of $27.5 million against a budget of at least $40M, and received very poorly by critics, several of whom described it as the worst film of the year. At the Razzie Awards, it “lost” that distinction to Holmes and Watson, while earning a Worst Actress award for McCarthy. It remains available on disc and streaming.

For my experiences, this film always stood out as an example of the same trends driving adult-oriented animation, taking traditionally “family friendly” genres and sources and turning it dark, subversive or entirely crude. What came to my mind in the course of this review is that this very mixed trend overlaps closely overlaps with what is called “over the top”, and the epiphany that led me to is that many of the most insightful examples came significantly earlier in live-action media. The paradox that becomes evident is that this can work independent of rating and content. You can find it in clever PG/ PG-13 films like Killer Klowns From Outer Space, in R-rated gore fests like Dead Alive and From Dusk Till Dawn, and in foreign films like House that never got anywhere near the Western mainstream. The chronic problem is that people who set out to do it are usually not the ones who succeed, and this is the archetypal example.

That brings us right to the first and foremost reality of the film, it’s one of the most egregious cases I’ve encountered of “too much and not enough”. This shows obviously in the rating. Anything that gets developed in a worthwhile way could have remained intact at PG-13, perhaps with some invented puppet slang in place of profanity, while anything that would have justified the R rating, especially the flying-fluff violence, isn’t pursued nearly far enough for a payoff. The mismatch shows even more in the story and above all the so-called mystery. The problem here is that great lengths are taken to create deeper motivation for the killer(s) where more clever takes, both comedic and “straight”, have long since deconstructed such things as unnecessary. In reality, there’s just two quite obvious scenarios: Either the killer is a member of the cast, with some ultimately interchangeable grievance, or it’s all the work of some crazed fan whose further motivations would be useless to analyze. Then my big rant is that the latter scenario, not even mentioned on screen, should absolutely have been the one pursued. Heck, now I’m getting a picture of a “collector” with a Muppet version of the Predator’s trophy room…

Even with that dissection out of the way, I freely admit that I haven’t gotten to the core of the story. The mystery genre has always been character-driven, especially the hard-boiled/ noir variety that this movie clearly aims to emulate, and there’s plenty of ways to redeem a “bad” plot. The difficulty here is that we have characters who are mismatched in development as well as personality. By my blunt-instrument assessment, Phil the puppet is a developed character who belongs in this world, as much as we know of it.  His human partner, on the other hand, feels like a man’s idea of Miss McCarthy playing herself. This imbalance is directly compounded by already dodgy worldbuilding when it comes to their backstory. The patently absurd accusation that Phil would refuse to harm another puppet could have worked as an illustration of the self-contradictory nature of prejudice, if the wonky racial metaphors had lasted that long. The implied tension between them, however, is just more contrived drama in an assumed universe where gross-out gags and emotional manipulation have long since displaced any pretense of logic.

That leaves the “one scene”, and there is truly just one sequence I can accept as justifying the very existence of this misbegotten experiment, and it’s dug in enough that I can reconstruct it from a viewing a few days before this review. About 15 minutes in, Phil has found his way to a puppet porn shop, owned by Vinny, a scuzzy buzzard introduced in voice-over as “not really a friend, more of a disgusting acquaintance”. Vinny and his shop more than justify the description, complete with the agitated rabbit Bumblypants. While Phil is looking around a backroom that somehow doesn’t contain a well-prepared ambush, an armed black-clad intruder enters, who is never really identified. It seems to be a human, though there’s so little that’s on the puppets’ scale that we can’t really tell. Vinny promptly announces, “We’re having a sale, anything you want,” while the rabbit freezes in place, and the skill of both performers is clearly evident. The intruder is distracted by the bystander, long enough for Vinny to draw. There’s a veritable spray of stuffing in the exchange of fire. The killer turns back to the rabbit, whose reaction is shown with two plastic Easter eggs, then the camera zooms in on the shotgun muzzle. Per my usually refrain, it’s a good scene that delivers on the potential of the premise, honestly a major reason I saw fit to look at the movie again. But in light of what follows, it’s a true bait and switch. If the rest of the movie was like this, it would be From Dusk Till Dawn with fluff instead of vampire guts. (How did I use that one as a “good” example twice???) Instead, we get a feature-length TV animation pilot for a show that isn’t animated and also isn’t funny.

In closing, I’m left not just with the rating, but with the tagline. Of course, this isn’t technically a Muppet movie, and considering that the franchise and its offshoots have been around on every media platform for over 60 years, there’s undoubtedly “real” Muppet offerings that are worse. But this is a full-length movie from the same company and crew, with the specific intention of appealing to “mature” audiences. In those terms, I can’t say I actively hate it, if only because of the fine work of Barretta and the supporting crew. For sheer disappointment, however, this is possibly the lowest they’ve come since “Trek 1”. With that, I shake my head and keep walking. And I’m definitely scraping my shoes when I get to the welcome mat.