Directed by Josh Funk
After the insane glory of Stitches, let’s bring things back to normal a bit with The Fuzzies, the most straightforward of our movies so far. There aren’t any big gimmicks like subgenre crossovers or an entire sock puppet world, but sometimes you need to get back to basics.
After the untimely death of a beloved children’s show host, the deceased’s estranged friends are called in to a secret reading of her will. In this will it’s revealed that the friends are given valuable real estate – on the sole condition that they locate the host’s puppet co-host, who has mysteriously vanished. Upon arriving at the house deep in the woods, the group soon realizes that something is very wrong here, something that might hold the truth of what happened to their friend.
What follows is a kind of slow burn descent into the whimsical horror that’s become a bit more fashionable in recent years, something on full display in the recent movie Buddy, and while The Fuzzies doesn’t reach those heights, it’s a respectable film that takes itself seriously enough to work. There is still comedy here, of course, you can’t have a horror movie with felt puppets without a couple jokes, but the jokes are restrained enough to not overshadow the drama and it tends to stay on the darker side, which does help. I’m also a big fan of the visual design, the puppets are reminiscent of Sesame Street in a good way, and everyone has this kind of odd retro look about them in terms of clothing and even cars, which helps give a kind of fairy tale vibe to the atmosphere.
The Fuzzies has problems here and there. A bit too much of the dialogue has the ‘everyone is a dick’ issue, but at least it’s kind of justified here because of the unusual circumstances. There are also some issues with pacing, especially in the first half of the movie, but that gets taken care of when things begin to pick up following a pivotal scene in a bathroom. The Fuzzies isn’t perfect, it’s a bit uneven, but I enjoyed it well enough and I really respect the attention to detail, especially in the puppetry, including puppets that are there for only one shot. This is definitely behind Stitches in terms of enjoyability, but it gets a huge boost from the finale which features a lot of great stop motion puppet work and a fitting ending to the story which shockingly makes the rest of the movie’s narrative make a lot more sense.
