Aahhhhh… another year, another Spike and Mike cartoon extravaganza. This most recent installment of their fairly popular Sick and Twisted franchise certainly lives up to its title, enthusiastically offering a seemingly endless parade of animated atrocities that are sure to make all but the most jaded of viewers sit up and take notice. Unfortunately, the majority of these vignettes fail to tickle the funny bone as intended. Of course, there are some exceptions — the pleasingly morbid “Petey’s Wake”; the spirited if overlong silliness of “Dirty Birdy”; the impressively satirical, impossibly violent “Watching T.V.”; the comically brutal catharsis of “Slaughter Day”; Bill Plympton’s clever, surreal “How To Make Love To a Woman”; and, of course, the imaginative, hilariously deadpan adventures of “No Neck Joe” — but most of the shorts here are simply in love with their own grotesqueries. But unlike, say, the early films of John Waters, these animators provide little wit or imagination to accompany their admittedly strong images, as if graphically animated sex and violence was in itself so humorous a concept that it required no artistic embellishment to get laughs from the audience. To make matters worse, many of the shorts are surprisingly mean-spirited, like the pointless, mindless sadism of the humorless “Little Yellow Bird,” which consists of nothing more than a little girl singing a whimsical nursery rhyme while smashing the titular yellow bird into bloody pieces with a hammer (the press kit likens this piece to the seminal “Bambi vs. Godzilla,” but don’t be fooled, it lacks that classic short’s sense of fun that poked fun at its own ludicrous one-joke concept). This is the problem with most of the material here: Bad taste has been confused with wit, and shock value has been mistaken for audacity. The result is a mostly hollow, joyless collection that seems far more concerned with making you sick than making you laugh. Only the few episodes manage the desired effect, which is to have you both disgusted and cackling at the same time.
This article appears in August 9 • 1996 (Cover).