Meet the Feebles

A company of puppets is putting together a variety show for television. Backstage there is something else: addiction, gambling debt, venereal disease, blackmail and jealousy. Heidi, the hippo who stars in the show, learns her boss has been cheating on her and walks onstage with a gun on the final night. The film is not interested in puppet comedy. It is interested in the rot behind a show: it takes a children's format and fills it with adult squalor, and carries that all the way. The joke is single: what looks sweet is putrid inside. The form is handmade: puppets, cramped studio sets, a low budget and unshowy shooting. Blood and secretions are used generously. Peter Jackson directed. It is his second film, from the middle of his early New Zealand period, after Bad Taste and before Braindead. It was largely made with friends and very limited means. It reached a small audience on release and became a cult item later through video and midnight screenings. Who it is for: viewers curious about extreme black humour and early Jackson. Who it is not for: almost everyone; the film contains vomit, drugs, animal pornography and graphic violence and never once pulls back.