‘The splatter aspect of the film is highly stylised and tends more towards farce than naturalism. It is more in the style of Monty Python than Sam Peckinpah. Similarly, the characters should not be read as naturalistic. Lionel and Cathy are naïve innocents in a world populated by the bizarre and the grotesque.’
We were very aware that, whilst we had a script, nothing was going to happen with Braindead before Bad Taste was screened in Cannes, but it was a strategic decision to have a prospective next project to capitalise on any attention that Bad Taste might pick up at the festival. Nevertheless, I was still faced by this five-month period of unemployment…
More plans were hatched at regular meetings at Fran and Stephen’s flat over a Chinese restaurant in Courtney Place, past which, years later, Peter would ride in the triumphant motorcade en route to the premiere of The Return of the King.
Cameron Chittock, who joined in many of these sessions, recalls: ‘Basically, we would get together and conspire to make evil projects!’ One of these dubious enterprises would eventually carry the unlikely tag line: ‘Sex, Drugs and Soft Toys’. While working on Bad Taste, Peter had coined the term ‘splatstick’ to describe something that combined the gory messiness of the splatter movie with knockabout laughs of a slapstick comedy. Now he was thinking of another combinationgenre by grafting the ever-appealing splatter movie with – a puppet film. The new idea was for a ‘spluppet movie’!
In the Seventies and Eighties puppets had achieved a new worldwide popularity through the work of Jim Henson, whose contribution to the American educational television series, Sesame Street, had led to the international hit TV series, The Muppet Show. The premise of a group of puppets producing and starring in a vaudeville show – with intriguing glimpses of backstage tantrums and traumas – not only made household names of Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, Rowlf and the rest of the gang, it catapulted them into a series of big-screen adventures beginning, in 1979, with The Muppet Movie, which was followed by The Great Muppet Caper and The Muppets Take Manhattan.
With each of the Muppet feature films, the characters became increasingly liberated not simply from the confines of their puppettheatre home but also from their puppeteers, to the extent of finding it possible to take a cycle ride through London’s Hyde Park. It was a conceit that Peter and his ‘co-conspirators’ wickedly seized upon…
My initial idea was a very simple image: an all-singing, all-dancing Muppet-style TV show, except that back-stage there are no puppeteers taking puppets off their arms; the puppets are not puppets at all, they are real: they walk into the dressing-room, rip the tab off a can of beer, light up a cigarette and say, ‘God, that was a terrible show tonight!’ As for the show itself, that was just a piece of cheesy entertainment put on
Following the completion of Bad Taste in November 1987, there was an agonizing wait until the film was to be screened at Cannes in May 1988. I was unemployed, broke and still living at home, so I filled in the time writing Braindead with Stephen and Fran, and devising the idea for Meet the Feebles with Cameron. Eventually Cameron and I started building puppets to bring our ideas to life.
by these characters that have the same flaws and weaknesses as any human being.
Unlike the mild-mannered Muppets – whose frailties and idiosyncrasies are charmingly portrayed and utterly inoffensive – the Feebles, as the puppets in this version were to be called, were to be blatantly into anything and everything that was either illegal or immoral, or both! Although the name suggested that this devious, dubious bunch of crooks and perverts were somehow related to the clean-living characters created by Jim Henson, Peter never saw the idea as being a parody of The Muppet Show.
Essentially, the Feebles were satirising human greed and weakness; we were sending up human beings and human nature, not puppets themselves.
The original concept for using the Feebles had sprung out of a suggestion by Grant and Bryce Campbell for a possible late-night television show hosted by an elderly, cantankerous character called Uncle Herman who would tell a series of unlikely (even unsuitable) bedtime tales.
Uncle Herman’s Bedtime Whoppers, as we called it, was to be a series of outrageous one-off, half-hour films devoted to different subjects, featuring different actors and probably made by different film-makers. In fact, they’d have nothing in common other than being introduced by Uncle Herman. Talking with Cameron, Stephen and Fran, we decided that this puppet thing featuring the Feebles might be a good candidate for one of Uncle Herman’s Whoppers!
Stephen and Fran roped in another of their friends, writer, actor and cabaret comic, Danny Mulheron, who had directed Stephen’s satiric musical, Big Bickies and was collaborating with the playwright on an outrageous farce, The Sex Fiend. Described as possessing an ‘unstoppable curiosity and twisted perception of the world that is truly frightening and thoroughly entertaining,’ Danny was a suitably anarchic talent to be invited to join in the creation of the Feebles’ madhouse of mutated Muppets. Danny joined Peter, Stephen and Fran in writing the script as well as contributing lyrics for songs while Cameron Chittock began designing the stars of the show that was now being called Meet the Feebles.
Peter was feeling decidedly happy with life.
I thought, ‘This is fantastic! This is a five-month project that will keep me busy until May when I go off to Cannes and get the money for Braindead.’ We applied to the Film Commission for some funding – not much, $30–40,000 – convinced that it was a pretty much guaranteed certainty. After all, I had finished Bad Taste…True it hadn’t yet been released or sold anywhere, but they’d seen it and knew what I could do. They were hardly going to turn us down for an inexpensive half-hour TV show.
But they did. The Film Commission declined the application on the grounds that Peter had assumed would make them assist: Meet the Feebles was not a feature film project, but a one-off TV programme which was never going to have any sales in the film marketplace. The money requested might have been relatively small, but it was an unsound investment. The group explained that Feebles would be part of a TV series, but it was a series that had yet to be commissioned and funded.
We had a council of war and were very angry with this – as you always were in those days, whenever we got turned down or knocked back! Stephen, Fran, Cameron and me decided that we would fund it ourselves. It felt a bit like Bad Taste all over again, except that we were going to be doing it on a reasonably professional level: we were going to have a small crew, shoot it in a block and get it done. So we drew up a minimal budget of $25,000 and all chipped in equal shares. We put together a crew and Cameron and I started building puppets, getting together each day in the basement under his flat, chopping up foam and carving and sculpting these characters.
Characters like Bletch the Walrus, a lascivious impresario and, literally, a ‘cat-lover’; Arthur the Stage-manager, a cockney worm in a flat cap and jumper (knitted by Peter’s mum); Wynyard the Drug-and-war-crazed Frog with a perilous knife-throwing act; and the star of
Stephen and Fran came on board Meet the Feebles, not just as writers but also co-financing a self-funded Bad Tastestyle short film shoot. It was another case of everyone pitching in – here one of our puppeteers, Eleanor Aitkin, and Fran build sets for the forthcoming mini-production.
‘The Fabulous Feebles Variety Hour’: Heidi, a ‘gorgeous hunk of hippohood’, played by Danny Mulheron inside a huge, pink foam-rubber hippopotamus suit.
As is done with animated films, the Feebles’ dialogue was recorded prior to the beginning of filming so that the puppeteers would be able to perform to a pre-recorded voice-track. The vocal cast included Peter Vere-Jones, who had provided the voice for Lord Crumb in Bad Taste, as Bletch and Brian Sergent, who would later play Ted