Review: The Happytime Murders

The film aims only to shock, refusing to deliver anything in an intriguingly post-ironic way in the process.

The Happytime Murders
Photo: STX Entertainment

Brian Henson’s The Happytime Murders imagines a fictional world where humans and puppets coexist, as well as believes to exist in a real one where audiences have never been exposed to puppets doing and saying the filthiest things. Not unlike its Puppets Gone Wild predecessors—from Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles to Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America: World Police to Comedy Central’s Crank Yankers—the inaugural film from the adult-oriented Henson Alternative production company aims to shock, but it refuses to deliver anything in an intriguingly post-ironic way in the process.

At the center of The Happytime Murders’s flimsy story is Phil Phillips (Bill Barretta), the LAPD’s first puppet detective. After missing his chance to take out the puppet who was holding his human partner, Detective Connie Edwards (Melissa McCarthy), hostage, Phil was disgraced and kicked off the force, ensuring that puppets everywhere would continue to be viewed as second-class citizens. Throughout the film, Henson and company acknowledge the existence of police corruption and racial profiling, but rather than scrutinize these inequities, they simply lean on a steady stream of juvenile and tacky jokes that correlate, without empathy, the experience of blue felt-skinned puppets to that of real-life African Americans, from Phil criticizing his actor brother, Larry (Victor Yerrid), for bleaching his skin, to the sleazy producer (Michael McDonald) of a once-popular show called The Happytime Gang talking about how he disciplines his “uppity” puppet servants.

Right out of the gate, the noir-esque narrative hits every predictable beat, while the filmmakers cram each scene with a glut of senseless puppet depravity, from cursing and extreme violence to drug use and sex acts. Despite the bad blood between them, Phil and Connie reunite to hunt down a serial killer who’s started offing former puppet stars of The Happytime Gang, including Phil’s brother. And as the two detectives plunge further into their investigation, taking them from one destitute and debased cast member of The Happytime Gang to the next, the film trades in its questionable race-based humor for even lazier sexist jokes as prostitutes and drug addicts repeatedly mistake Connie for a man. In the film’s mind, apparently nothing is funnier than asking a woman if you can suck her dick for 50 cents—except, perhaps, the sight of a puppet violently cumming all over a room.

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The Happytime Murders isn’t only unduly late to the game in terms of dirty puppet humor, but it’s also content to deliver nothing more than the polar opposite of the family-friendly tendencies of The Muppet Show and The Great Muppet Caper. If Henson is interested in putting his film in dialectical conversation with his father’s early work, you wouldn’t know it from the way he rubs his audience’s faces in the muck with reckless abandon.

Phil and Connie’s journey toward reconciliation is pockmarked with silly insults and nonstop displays of puppets being debaucherous, which all ceases to be shocking or humorous by the third or fourth time someone’s snorted purple sugar, the puppet underworld’s drug of choice. Worse, in this world where overindulgence is the norm, no amount of perversion can distract from the fundamental lack of inspiration to the film’s central mystery. Best to make like a puppet junkie and grab a Twizzler in order to snort some of that purple sugar, because restoring your mind to its 12-year-old state may be the only way to enjoy this relentless onslaught of puerile awfulness.

Score: 
 Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Bill Barretta, Joel McHale, Maya Rudolph, Leslie David Baker, Elizabeth Banks, Dorien Davies  Director: Brian Henson  Screenwriter: Todd Berger  Distributor: STX Entertainment  Running Time: 91 min  Rating: R  Year: 2018  Buy: Video

Derek Smith

Derek Smith's writing has appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes, Apollo Guide, and Cinematic Reflections.

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