While no human are killed in The Happy Time Murders there are a lot of muppet atrocities: drawn and quartering by cute chihuahuas and Frenchies, felt eviscerations and lots of fluffy feathery head explosions. There is also a lot of muppet sex, and for the questioning, depictions of puppet semen and muppet female genitalia that over exposes the infamous brief flash Sharon Stone exposed in Basic Instinct.
Is it funny? Yes. The problem is that there is not enough of it and it lacks variety. If son Brian Henson is going to murder the family legacy he might as well make it bloody, gory, raunchy and a total destruction of the innocents, not just wrap it up in a bland police story featuring a game Melissa McCarthy that could have been a skit on the muppet show or just another one of their pastiche caper flicks.
The Happy Time Murders wants to be as profanely funny as Team America: World Police. It just doesn’t have the nerve or the heart. Trey Parker proved that you could get away with anything on screen and still get an R rating if you do it with puppets.
The raunch doesn’t cancel out the bland, making The Happy Time Murders just a misfire and not a disaster.
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