Meet The Feebles - DVD Review

MOVIE
VIDEO
AUDIO
EXTRAS
OVERALL

One Disc
1.33:1 Aspect Ratio/Pan & Scan
Mono
Run Time: 94 Minutes
Keep Case

MOVIE
Not Rated but contains any number of perversions, profanity and violence

Let me ground everybody firmly in the kind of humor I like. I love John Waters, subversive and repulsive cinema since the early seventies. I hate the Farrely Brothers. I don't believe they have an original bone in their bodies, basically recycling what Waters has been doing for the past thirty years. So what we have is two types of gross out comedies. The thing is, compared to John Waters' films, the Farrelys are homogenized. Softened. Still repulsive and bizarre, but not so far over the top that you can be infected by one of their movies. So, like Waters I suppose came Peter Jackson initially.
"Peter Jackson," you say, "wasn't that guy up for best director last year?" Yes, Peter Jackson, director of Lord of the Rings started out very differently with strange splatter/gross out comedies starting with Bad Taste in 1987, a film about aliens landing in New Zealand and a crack squad of citizens try to take them down. You may have seen the video box, it's the one with the alien flicking you off. A little later, he made the slick and hysterical Braindead (known as Dead Alive in the states) a zombie comedy with the most blood I've ever seen. Between the two of these, and before he grew up and made the Academy Award nominated Heavenly Creatures with Kate Winslet, Jackson decided to parody the Muppet movies and created The Feebles.
Well, how to even begin. For much of the running time of this film, Fiancée Willow Rosenberg and I sat in stunned silence, occasionally breaking that with a chuckle at the absurdity of it all. The entire thing takes place in a Television studio where The Feebles (a race of animal beings that all live in the studio) prepare for their first live show that night. The show is produced by Bletch, an enormous walrus who's been dating the show's star Heidi the Hippo. When we first see Bletch, he's having sex with a Siamese cat hell bent on being the next star.
A Hedgehog named Robert shows up with a speech impediment that would make Pontius Pilate proud (not the real Pontius Pilate, the one played by Michael Palin) with an ambition to join the show. He falls in love with a poodle who is being targeted as a possible porno actress by the filmmaking rat who lives in the basement and currently makes. . .are you ready for this. . .anteater/cow porn. On top of this is a promiscuous rabbit that finds out he has AIDS, a heroin addicted 'Nam Vet frog knife thrower and a large fly reporter that hangs out in the sewage system below the theater. And there's the director of the show, dying to add his song about sodomy to the show.
The movie is way too long for its own good. This kind of thing is better served in smaller helpings or at least with more story surrounding it. Pink Flamingoes, the grand Godfather of all gross out comedies, banned in several states, really only had a handful of major gross out gags in the entire film, surrounded by an absurd but interesting story. Meet the Feebles goes the other way, jettisoning the story except when it serves their needs and jamming gross out gags into nearly every minute of the film. This results in a breakneck speed that leaves the viewer feeling kinda hollow as it approaches its climax. Twenty minutes could have been cut, twenty minutes worth of gags and I would've put this up at three and a half stars, but it takes too long to get where it's going and throws too much at us to be very likable.

VIDEO QUALITY
Thanks to our good friends over at the omnipresent Internet Movie Database, I found out two important things about Meet The Feebles. First off, it was shot on 35mm film, when I'd assumed 16mm (which to anyone who knows film knows it's a compliment to say 16mm looks like 35mm, but not when you go the other way) and secondly it was shot in 1.85:1 flat Widescreen. So, our image, first off, commits the grand sin of releases, pan and scan. Secondly, there are so many scratches present, I began to wonder if they were there on purpose, so it would feel like we were watching a snuff film, but until I hear otherwise, I'll be forced to assume they were the product of a poor print poorly transferred. There is so much pixelization present that at times the picture looks like a VCD. Then, the image stand to be brightened a bit. Perhaps the film was dark, but I'm betting not David Lynch dark. What results is a muddy picture where characters all but disappear into the blackness, pulled by some leviathan in the abyss.

AUDIO QUALITY
Well, through research I couldn't find out what type of audio was on this disc. It sounded like mono and there were no references to the audio type on any of my sources, (amazon.com, the back of the case) but in any instance, the audio is just a hare above the picture quality. (Didja see what I did there? But don't worry, that hare DOESN'T have any STDs) The scratches that are everywhere in the film are nicely accompanied by pops and hisses and an overlying hum throughout the film. Everything seems to have been mixed to the exact same high volume so it becomes a cacophony of noise as it builds to its very loud climax.

EXTRAS
Okay, we have a collection of trailers for other movies from this DVD company that all sound like soft porn titles. Then, we have "interactive menu" that, while not touted as an extra on the casing, is the closest thing this DVD has to an extra. We don't even have a collectable card featuring the chapter stops. WE DON'T EVEN HAVE CHAPTER STOPS!

CLOSING THOUGHTS
I don't know what to say. I'm glad I saw it. I'd heard a lot about it as a film student. Was it worth it? Well, I paid eight bucks for it at a Best Buy sale and that's just three bucks more than it would've cost to rent it somewhere assuming I could find it ANYWHERE EVER. Which I probably couldn't. So, what does that say? Well, this made us late for a pretty good dinner engagement, so I could be angry at it for that. But on the other hand, this along with its far superior companions Dead Alive and Bad Taste (the former better than the latter) give us an idea where Peter Jackson came from as a filmmaker, making it all that much more impressive that he had movies like The Frighteners, Heavenly Creatures and Lord of the Rings in him. So, buy it if you want to. Or maybe you could borrow it from me.