Brian Henson, 80 mins, starring or voiced by: Melissa McCarthy, Bill Barretta, Joel McHale, Maya Rudolph, Leslie David Baker, Elizabeth Banks
The Happytime Murders is a hard-boiled LA private eye yarn... starring hand puppets. It’s from the same company that gave us the Muppets, but you didn’t get drug taking and rampant sex scenes when Kermit was around. Nor did Miss Piggy show off her pubic hair, Basic Instinct-style, in the way that the puppet femme fatale does here.
From time to time, the film will elicit a few guilty sniggers. Scenes of rabbits in dirty macs with strange peccadilloes fidgeting in sex shops or of puppet pussy parties or, most outrageous of all, of a puppet ejaculating on the ceiling, are almost funny in a smutty frat boy way.
Overall, though, this is dismal fare. It’s hard to tell who comes off the worst - the puppets or the humans alongside them. The film certainly marks a nadir in Melissa McCarthy’s comedy career.
The first five minutes are promising. “Although it ain’t a crime to be warm and fuzzy, it might as well be,” private eye Phil Phillips (voiced in very gruff fashion by Bill Barretta) observes of the way puppets are victimised. They’re second-class citizens. “If you’re a puppet, you’re screwed!”
Phil may sound as world-weary and cynical as Bogart or Robert Mitchum but he is a fluffy blue sock - and that can’t help but diminish any charisma he might otherwise have had. His backstory is deeply confusing. He used to be on the police force with human cop Connie Edwards (Melissa McCarthy) as his partner but they had a massive falling out. Phil was dismissed or had to quit in shame.
There is a shameful secret in his past. As his history shows, “puppet cops won’t shoot other puppets.”
Before taking up the uniform, Phil was also part of the Happytime Gang, a Sesame Street-style TV family which had a huge following. Now a killer is coming after the gang, knocking them off one by one.
The first time a puppet is shot, the effect is momentarily arresting. Instead of blood and guts, what spills out in horsehair, feathers and stuffing. The second and third time we see such a scene, the impact is much diminished.
The relationship between the puppets and the humans makes no sense whatsoever. Nor is it explained why the puppets are so discriminated against in the first place. McCarthy plays most of the film with a big scowl on her face, as if she would far rather be anywhere else than next to her furry co-stars.
However, she is fully culpable for the criminal waste of time and talent that the film becomes. She didn’t just star in The Happytime Murders. She helped produce it too.
The Happytime Murders hits UK cinemas 27 August.
