Before tackling Tolkien, Peter Jackson turned the Muppets onto heroin and sodomy

Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: Our ongoing Sesame Street Week has us thinking about movies starring puppets.
Meet The Feebles (1989)
Peter Jackson’s Meet The Feebles uses puppets the way sexual abuse therapists do: to act out scenarios too stomach-churning to put in the non-felt-covered hands of people. Like taking a walk down a Sesame Street crowded with scabby prostitutes and discarded needles, the 1989 black comedy depicts a troupe of cracked-mirror-image Muppets who embody the exact opposite of every one of Jim Henson’s virtues. Selfish, scheming, riddled with disease and drug addiction, and given to bursting into song celebrating the joys of anal sex, the Feebles make the puppets of Broadway’s Avenue Q look positively saccharine. One imagines their puppeteers worked them with two layers of latex gloves.
Meet The Feebles was made during Jackson’s young and outrageous period, amid other viscous, viscera-filled comedies like Bad Taste and Dead Alive—the movies that left his earliest fans taken aback when it was announced that he’d been handed The Lord Of The Rings. It’s easy to read it as a direct parody of The Muppet Show: The Feebles’ assortment of animal characters are also mounting a variety show in hopes of landing a Muppets-like TV series, and the action similarly cuts between their on-stage musical numbers and their antics behind the curtain. But Jackson has coyly denied it being a direct takeoff, saying Meet The Feebles was really about “satirizing human behavior.” (Still, one can’t help but notice the Kermit The Frog lookalike who makes a cameo nailed to a crucifix.)