LET MY PUPPETS COME

Special to PollyStaffle.com

I’m not sure why they made this film, but I can say that if you pick it up used somewhere for five bucks, that’s more then what was spent making it probably. Let My Puppets Come is a porno flick made using puppets that look a lot like Jim Henson’s Muppets and may have even influenced Henson, being contemporaneous with the beginning of The Muppet Show, with a few human actors. This piece of filth is from the 70’s grindhouse era. It was directed by Gerard Damiano, who is best known for making Deep Throat - the 70’s porno flick that became a cross over hit after its legal battles made the news - which is actually alluded to in Let My Puppets Come. It’s worth watching because it’s so utterly wretched.

There’s a singing penis in it and a scene with a swimming puppet receiving a blowjob from a fish. Get it? It’s a blowfish! I know that joke kind of blows, but that’s sort of what you get from Let My Puppets Come. It’s perverted like that and has a lot of that potty humor which tends in a lot places to be a little on the flat side.

It’s repulsive and frightening. The very concept of a porno made using puppets has that pedophilic undertone because puppet shows are for children. Also, they’re fucking puppets. There not even human. Almost all pornography uses adult humans interacting and therefore is not that abnormal, sex being normal adult human activity. Once you start getting off on the non-human… these puppets are sinister looking, and slap each other around a lot. These puppets have an aggressive and hostile streak to them, on top of being pornographers.

It has a loose plotline that this company owes money to a mobster named Mr. Big, who is really a midget at the end (get it! Mr. Big!). Jimmy the delivery boy suggests they make a “fuck flick.” They race against time to put together this film, calling in help from “Pornocchio”, a transsexual puppet (you get to see the puppets dick get cut off), a signing penis puppet, and a pornographer puppet in bondage gear. The bondage puppet smacks the shit out of the transsexual puppet in one part. The puppet in the bondage is really violent and curses a lot at the cast. When the puppets are done, and they need filler materials they throw in a couple of commercials. There’s one for a feminine hygiene spray called Sweat Fish that has a jingle with the lyrics, “Keep that stinky cunt away, use that sweat fish everyday” or something like that. In the end the movie within a movie wins an Oscar.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find it funny that the puppets say “shit” and “fuck” and “faggot.” The soundtrack is actually kind of cool because there’s of course 70s porno disco-funk nonsense playing in the background through out the film. This piece of shit is without question mondo bizarre jack off material from the depth of 70s disco-funk hell. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the people who made this flick were on a shitload of cocaine. This film is probably indicative of a lot of what’s fundamentally wrong with the human race. That doesn’t mean by any stretch of the imagination that it shouldn’t be watched, rather that is a good reason why it should. What the fuck, watch it. It’s only a short (40 minutes or so). It’s not dull. It’s foul, but it isn’t dull. In a way, it is the ultimate portrait of spiritual bankruptcy. This film hurts. It hurts so much it must be art.

- William Wheaton, April 2010

For more from Wheaton, visit his Myspace