Judy & Punch (2019) - Movie Review

Even in an era when distaff revamps of older material are quite commonplace, this one is more out-there than most. It’s a reinterpretation of a 17^th-century puppet show (itself an ancestor of mature puppet capers like Meet The Feebles and Avenue Q), directed by first-time filmmaker Mirrah Foulkes, one of many, many actors who got worldwide attention after featuring in David Michôd's Animal Kingdom. I swear, that movie was designed to break games of Six Degrees To Kevin Bacon.

The Happytime Murders (2018) - Movie Review

The plot: Private investigator Phil Phillips (Bill Barretta), a former member of the Los Angeles police department, has to deal with a lot of prejudice from the humans in the neighbourhood. However, he will need to put that aside and team up with his former partner Det. Connie (Melissa McCarthy) to track down a murderer who appears to be targeting the retired cast of 90's puppet sitcom 'The Happytime Gang'.

Nightmare On Elmo's Street (2015) - Movie Review

What is it about puppets that fascinates us so much? I mean, the outreach of Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop is staggering, between the Muppets, Sesame Street and their other miscellaneous works. Maybe it’s as an extension of our reaction to ventriloquist dummies and how a decent performer can convince an audience that the object made of felt with a hand shoved up its rear, or maybe it’s because we are willing to accept some aspects of the Uncanny Valley which some of the better puppets can reach; either way, it has served as a source of comedy for a long time now. Of course, being the age that we live in, they have also been used to further the tradition of taking all that is child-friendly and twisting them until the heads of their souls drop off. Whether it’s the transgressive humour of Meet The Feebles, the bitingly relatable musical Avenue Q or the numerous YouTube accounts that have made use of how relatively cheap it can be to make puppets, the more adult audiences have been able to enjoy this phena-mahna (da-doo-da-doodoo) as well. Time for our first dive into the realm of all things fuzzy on this blog, as we take another look at the filmography of Bill Zebub and, at least in my case, hope for something a bit better than last time.