Some movie titles lend themselves perfectly to pornographic pastiches. Shaving Ryan’s Privates being a notable example. Along with Seven Rides for Seven Brothers, Throbbin Hood and Assablanca. Though my favourite addition to the genre would be the bluntly-named Baws which could feature the strapline: Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the daughter. Puerile? Perhaps. But not as much as the latest R-rated release from Annapurna and Point Grey Pictures – the first CGI-animated film to receive such a rating from the Motion Picture Association of America – which given its puntastic title and strong adult content renders a pornographic spin-off about a skinless hot dog slipping his meaty shaft into a tight but welcoming bun unnecessary.

Sausage Party by the writing quartet of Seth Rogen, Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir and Evan Goldberg is a hoot! The premise, as articulated in the opening number The Great Beyond, being that grocery items in a branch of Shopwell’s supermarket are spared the grisly truth of their “date with oblivion” at the hands of carnivorous and vegetarian consumers by a “God Is Great” mantra passed down from their Non-Perishable elders led by Bill Hader as Firewater and Craig Robinson as Mr Grits which promotes a wonderful afterlife “where we’re sure nothing bad happens”.

That is until a jar of Honey Mustard (Danny McBride) is returned to the store by a fussy owner who mistook him for a jar of Ordinary and warns frankfurter Frank (Seth Rogen), a college jock who can’t keep his wiener in his pants, and his cheerleader girlfriend with hot dog buns to die for Brenda Bunson (Kristen Wiig) that “The Great Beyond is bull shit!” Knives chop, food processors whizz, microwave ovens frazzle and omniscient humans are not Gods but Monsters.

Their saviour gives credence to the proverb “good things come in small packages” – Barry (Michael Cera), a deformed sausage with an impressive girth but modest length of three inches who faces down his bullies and saves the day by beheading a Druggie high on bath salts (James Franco) and proving to his fellow perishables that good will trump evil if they stop saving themselves for The Great Beyond and focus instead on what is “right in front of us the whole time”. And what is right in front of several of his accomplices is, in short, a piece of ass which they want some part of.

For Douche by name douche bag by nature (Nick Kroll as a feminine hygiene product which relieves, ahem, vaginal irritation), a hole by any other name would smell as sweet. For Salma Hayek’s lascivious lesbian Teresa del Taco who has the hots for Brenda Bunson, it’s “Once you go taco, you never go backo”. And for the “fat floppy thing that nobody knows exactly what it is” Kareem Abdul Lavash (David Krumholtz) who is destined for 76 bottles of Extra Virgin Olive Oil and his Woody Allen-esque rival Sammy Bagel Jr (Edward Norton), it’s their proclivity to spread their legs for their mutual friend Hummus.

There is much to like, particularly the overt political one-liners such as “Get away from me you f***ing fruits”, “God hates figs”, “Exterminate the juice” and “First they came for the bagels”. The wheelchair-bound piece of chewing Gum (Scott Underwood) with a Stephen Hawking-like voice who survives a volley of gunfire because “matter can’t be created or destroyed” is a sublime creation. And the bacchanalian finale where anything goes including same-sex blows is destined to provoke tuts and headshakes from the usual suspects of conservative Christians and reactionary Republicans who have not even seen the film. After an hour the overt sexual tone becomes a little tiresome and the revenge subplot threatens to derail an otherwise wacky and original script, but overall Sausage Party is well hung and tender.

Video courtesy of: Sony Pictures

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Peter Callaghan
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