Review of Meet the Feebles (1989) by Terry A — 08 Aug 2011

I was just looking through some bizarre movies on the list of today, and then one caught my eye. It called itself a "Bizarre, Mature, and Insane Puppet Splatter Film". If you've seen my Eraserhead review, or my other reviews you'll notice that I like bizarre movies.

After reading about this movie, I took an hour out of my day to watch it. Yep... bizarre it is. Meet the Feebles, however, isn't the Eraserhead, or The Shining, or even the Space Odyssey bizarre, though.

I've never seen anything like or even similar to this. The plot is, well, very flexible. Absolutely ever puppet you see has a disturbing, bizarre, or traumatizing back-story. This means that, technically, there ARE no minor characters.

These back-stories range from being in the Mafia, to having a drug addiction, to even fighting the war in Vietnam. The movie is very interesting, and the only boring part I'd say would be the first 15 minutes, were you're getting to know most of the characters.

Although there are many plots in this movie, these are the major ones. There is a very depressed (and fat) Hippo in this movie who has been one of the very first Feeble star. She gets more an more depressed later and later, and finally goes insane and attempts to kill herself.

.. however, something really insane happens instead, which is so vital to the main story (if there is one) that I will not spoil at all. The second one is a shy hedgehog trying to fit in. Notice in the genres bellow you'll see something that says "Comedy", this is most likely this role in the movie.

You see, he see this poodle and falls in love with at first sight, but he's to shy to do anything. This may seem cliché, but turns out that he gets the girl rather early into the movie... only for something very dark to happen (you won't believe it, but it's true).

The third is that Walrus character just so happens to be a gangster, who makes a living not only from his theater, but from selling his actors drugs. This later goes quite insane when a character dies violently from sniffing something that wasn't a drug at all.

.. but borax instead. These are, on my opinion, the most important plots, but it was hard to choose, considering that there are about 30 of them. The ending is very, very dark humor in my taste, though, as I got to know each character very well.

By ending, I don't mean the end of the movie as in the ending, but before the ending. The actual end of the movie is in no way meant to be funny at all... expect for a bit of the beginning, somewhat quoting "I'm going to live!".

However, without spoilers, I'll just tell you that it would be impossible to make a sequel. I do believe that's all I have to say... um, well actually, there's one more thing... HAPPY BIRTHDAY- oh, sorry, I mean, GOOD MOVIE!!! Despite the sad, sad ending.

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