The Happytime Murders (2018) * 1/2

Directed by:  Brian Henson

Starring:  Melissa McCarthy, Elizabeth Banks, Maya Rudolph, Joel McHale, Leslie David Baker, Bill Barretta (voice), Dorien Davies (voice)

Going in, I figured The Happytime Murders would be spectacularly bad or perhaps a hidden comic gem.    What is odd is that it's neither.    It's essentially a one-joke movie.    Once the novelty of puppets swearing, engaging in sex acts, and allowing their bodily (bodily?) fluids to fly everywhere subsides (and it subsides quickly), then you're left with not much else.

Maybe The Happytime Murders could've worked better if it weren't so interested in showing us puppets doing things we wouldn't normally see puppets do.    Seeing an octopus jerking off a sheep isn't funny, it's unsettling.    The Happytime Murders hopes to gets its laughs off of shock value instead of mining a scene for its humor.    Bad taste can be funny, but it's a high wire act which needs to be executed just right.    It isn't easy, but it can be done.

The Happytime Murders takes place in Los Angeles, in a bizarre world in which humans co-exist with puppets.    Puppets get the short of the end of this stick.   We meet private detective puppet Phil Phillips (voice of Bill Barretta) who used to a cop until a deadly incident in which he accidentally shot a civilian while trying to save his human partner Connie Edwards (McCarthy).    According to Phil, it happened twenty years ago, but then a few minutes later, he said it happened twelve years ago.    It's a noticeable gaffe in screenplay continuity. 

Phil and Connie are teamed up to investigate the murders of members of a 1990's TV show cast titled The Happytime Gang, which consisted of mostly friendly, spirited puppets.    These days, the puppets have fallen on hard times.    One frequents adult book stores, one is strung out on sugar (the drug of choice of puppets), one runs a crime ring, etc..    Phil used to be involved with the one human from the Happytime cast (Banks) and his brother Jimmy also used to star, although Jimmy has traded in his blue color for white and got a nose job.   

One by one, the puppets die in gruesome ways, and at one point Phil himself is a suspect.    He and Connie have a bad history, but they reconcile after swearing at each other a lot and getting deeper into the investigation.    The human actors are game, while Barretta lends a nice world-weary touch to his voicing of Phil.    But, then we see two puppets having sex on a desk and the male puppet ejaculates all over his office and we sink further into despair.     The Happytime Murders was directed by the late Muppets' creator Jim Henson's son Brian, but the movie never succeeds beyond the concept stage, which on paper might've sounded hilarious: "Hey guys, let's have puppets do wild things!  The script practically writes itself!", but in the execution, it's all wrong.