Meet the Feebles (1989)
Directed by Peter Jackson
Heidi the Hippo, star of 'The Feebles Variety Hour', discovers her lover Bletch the Walrus is cheating on her. And with all the world waiting for the big show, the assorted co-stars must contend with drug addiction, extortion, robbery, disease, Vietnam flashbacks, drug dealing, and murder.
5 connections found
View:
5 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Meet the Feebles to
I’ve always been a fan of Peter Jackson (going back to “Bad Taste,” “Meet the Feebles,” and “Dead Alive”).
Writer-director Peter Jackson began his filmmaking career with strange, outrageous, mostly bloody little films like "Bad Taste," "Meet the Feebles," and "Braindead" before moving on to more mainstream but decidedly odd movies like "Heavenly Creatures" and "The Frighteners."
Like Susie's father and her murderer, Jackson builds models the foam-rubber puppets of his early Meet the Feebles, the exponentially more complicated imaginary realms of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong and invites children of all ages to share his obsessions.
He was best known for the puppet sex-capade Meet the Feebles or Kate Winslet's debut Heavenly Creatures.
With The Fellowship of the Ring, director Peter Jackson (who has come a long way from his horror-tinged comedies Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles) and a slew of talented collaborators have managed to make J.R.R. Tolkien's dense fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings eloquently cinematic.
Cineast Factor: From Peter Jackson, director of the nearly pornographic puppet movie Meet the Feebles.
He has made most of his quirky little films (the deranged puppet farce Meet the Feebles, the zombie classic Braindead, the rapturous murder story Heavenly Creatures) in his native New Zealand.
He has always been a visual spellbinder, in cheapo horror gems like "Dead Alive" and smutty puppet movies like "Meet the Feebles" as much as his more respectable 1994 true-life noir "Heavenly Creatures."
The proceedings are a bit more solemn than usual from the previously prankish Jackson, though he still manages to sneak in some humor: the bumbling hobbits Pippin (Billy Boyd) and Merry (Dominic Monaghan); the very tall Gandalf's trouble adjusting to the very small Bilbo's hobbit-hole; the perpetually snoopy Samwise (Sean Astin); a dwarf one-liner that, I'm certain, did not come from the books; the burping, blink-and-you-miss-it cameo from the director himself, who, Hitchcock-like, has found his way into all his films except his puppet satire Meet the Feebles.
Advertisement
I bow to no one in my long-standing admiration for the screenwriting team of Jackson-Walsh — I came across these two when Meet the Feebles was still their current release and I saw Dead Alive twice on its original theatrical run — but some of their business here feels like filler.