Let My Puppets Come (1976) February 19th, 2024

Hyperbole is rewarded in modern American self expression. A decade ago Louis C.K. commented on the overuse of adjectives like ‘hilarious’ and ‘amazing’ suggests an underlying competitiveness inherent in self expression. How does one get attention in the cacophony of the ever louder, ever escalating social capital of public recognition? Be the loudest, most hyperbolic person you can.

This is the norm on social media for nearly every subject garnering any attention. Someone has to be the ‘worst mother’ but is it likely you’ve recorded the most damning evidence against them on your camera phone at Target? It’s lazy and worthless writing offering no insight to the qualities or lack thereof in the subject matter at hand. How is she the worst mother in relation to her competition? Is she worse than Mary Ann Cotton who killed 11 of her own children? Hopefully not.

I cycle through these thoughts everytime Sony Pictures releases another Spider-Man spinoff film like Morbius or Madame Web. The zeitgeist’s eye of Sauron focuses on these films and collectively agrees they’re the ‘worst movies ever’. These fucklenuts have never seen Let My Puppets Come.

Let My Puppets Come is a semi-pornographic precursor to other adult puppet productions like The Happytime Murders and Avenue Q. The premise is a group of theater/film producers (played by puppets) need a new hit and they decide to make pornography. They pitch scenes for their new adult films and suddenly we’re whisked away to a series of lewd vignettes only broken up by the slow progression of the main plot and introduction to the next weird puppet sex scene. Some of these include a scene where a puppet wants a topless woman to throw grapes at him and another where a trans puppet has their puppet penis cut off which allows them to be a puppet woman. None of these were as off-putting and grotesquely unfunny as the first vignette featuring a bored buxom puppetress copulating with her amorous puppet pet dog. Let My Puppets Come rides the line I didn’t even know existed between being not funny enough to be a good comedy and not sexy enough to be good pornography. Therefore it occupies an unflattering superposition of being both unwatchable and a noteworthy novelty. In the immortal words of Hunter S. Thompson, Let My Puppets Come is too weird to live, and too rare to die.

Let My Puppets Come isn’t the worst movie ever. I didn’t find it funny, it was undeniably shocking, but in the end… the puppets were skillfully constructed and puppeteered, someone set up lights and exposed their film correctly… and someone took the time to edit several weird puppet sex scenes into an uncomfortably cohesive narrative. Maybe my bar is too low but these aren’t the qualities of the ‘worst movie ever’. That’s Skinamarink.