Meet The Feebles – WTF did I just watch?!

Meet the Feebles is crazy, deranged, and downright terrible. And I fucking love it.

What if I told you that there was a Muppet movie where a walrus gets a blowjob from a cat? What if I told you that same movie ends with a big-titted hippo massacring an entire theater with an M60 machine gun? What if I told you that this movie was directed by the same guy who directed the Lord of the Rings movies?

Long ago in the magical year of 1989, Peter Jackson directed a little film by the name of Meet the Feebles. Meet the Feebles was a twisted parody of the Muppets, featuring vulgar language, intense violence, drug use, and even sex. All with puppets and people in animal costumes.

The movie did about as well as you’d expect, bringing in only $80,000 with a budget of $750,000.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it for you, Meet the Feebles is basically a giant shitpost of a movie. It’s not good by any stretch.

This is the cover of the DVD:

 

This movie is straight-up insanity.

But that’s okay, because I love insanity. I watched this with my friend and my girlfriend, and the entire time both of them said “What the fuck?!” with looks of confusion on their faces. I too spent most of the movie saying “What the fuck?!”, but with a look of amusement on my face. It’s so insane that it’s hilarious.

Meet the Feebles tells the story of a troupe of Muppet-esque performers known as the Feebles. The troupe, run by a walrus named Bletch, is putting on a variety show with the hope of getting it syndicated.

The troupe is also full of some of the most fucked up people puppets imaginable. There’s a rat running an underground pornography ring, a frog that’s addicted to heroin, a rabbit with a sex addiction, a hippo with an eating disorder, an elephant who had an illegitimate kid with a chicken, a neurotic fox that’s obsessed with sodomy, and many others.

I can’t stress enough just how insane this movie is. One minute you’re watching a walrus and a bulldog negotiate a large drug deal with a warthog on a golf course, then the next you’re watching a fly eat a terminally ill rabbit’s shit from a toilet while he blackmails the rabbit. Cut to a heroin-addicted frog’s flashback to his time fighting in Vietnam against gophers. At some point, a hippo visits a bakery and eats everything except for one cake, which she takes to go. Then a rat tries to date rape a dog to blackmail her into making porn for him, but is stopped by the dog’s fiancee, a hedgehog with a speech impediment. After all this, the warthog’s drugs turn out to be borax, so the walrus, the bulldog, and the rat head down to the docks with baseball bats and guns to kill the warthog and steal his drugs. They succeed, but the bulldog has his head ripped off by a giant spider (which works as the dock’s crane). Meanwhile, the show begins falling apart, so a fox goes on stage and does a musical number about sodomy, complete with penis-shaped pillars and condoms blown up like balloons. Backstage, the hippo snaps and tries to kill herself, but decides instead to grab the walrus’s M60 machine gun and massacres pretty much everybody in the troupe. Everybody, save for the hippo, the fox, the hedgehog, the dog, a worm, and an elephant and his half-chicken child, dies horribly.

I didn’t make any of that shit up. This is all in the movie.

And that doesn’t include the stuff I left out, like the swami sticking his head up his own ass, the walrus eating a live fish then barfing it up later, the cow dominatrix, or the aardvark sniffing used panties.

Meet the Feebles is billed as a musical, and while there’s a few musical numbers, it’s not really a musical in the traditional sense. The songs are part of the story, but they’re not used to tell it, and, with the exception of the song about sodomy, aren’t meant to be funny. Which is a shame, because I think that a few silly profane musical numbers would have added to the madness.

There are no live humans in the world of Meet the Feebles. Everyone is an animal puppet or a person in an animal costume, which only enhances what’s going on. Watching a frog puppet shoot up smack is crazy enough, but watching him have a Vietnam flashback is on an entirely different level, and you can’t help but laugh at the absurdity as gopher Charlies force frog soldiers to read and repeat “Lyndon Johnson is bad egg”. Just what the hell would LBJ look like in this crazy world anyway?

It’s obvious that Peter Jackson was taking the piss (and probably drugs) when he made this. In fact, people have asked him what he was going for, and he said that he was trying to make a movie that made him laugh. To quote:

I decided from the outset to make exactly the sort of puppet film that I would enjoy. It was a challenge to make myself laugh, and since I still chuckle whenever I see Meet the Feebles, I guess I succeeded.

 

This isn’t a movie for everyone, and chances are if you watch it you’ll be sitting there shaking your head and asking yourself “wtf am I watching?!” But if you’re a sucker for the absurd like I am, then you’ll enjoy this ride on the cinematic crazy train.

I don’t think Meet the Feebles is on any streaming services, so you’ll have to sail the seas on this one. I found my copy on 1337x Torrents, so check there.