Fresh off the unbridled success of his masterwork Deep Throat, Gerard Damiano turned his attention to subjects more rarefied. It was 1976, the year that Jim Henson’s The Muppet Show had begun airing and I am guessing that Mr. Damiano figured it would be a good idea to mix his forte, hardcore pornography, with the lighthearted whimsy of the muppets. Why he thought this was a good idea I was unable to discover.

I suppose the trick was striking the right balance between eroticism and comedy. A trick he most definitely did not pull off. I thought the film would feature two puppets being mushed together by frantic hands and lots of panting, but no, they actually made garish pink, puffy, plush vaginas and penises and filmed hardcore close ups of simulated intercourse. 

There should be a special word for sex simulated by puppets. Something to warn would be consumers, like a label that read “this film contains scenes of hardcore puppetration.” 

Damiano even rigged some kind of tube and pump system so his audience wouldn’t miss out on the all important money shots.

Sitting through simulated coitus was bad enough, but the depictions of oral sex were downright terrifying. It is hard to make a puppet look like it is gently licking or sucking, mostly it ends up looking like biting and chomping as if the receiver is under attack by some kind of felt covered backhoe.

Oh, did I mention it was a musical? I’m thinking focus groups and demographic breakdowns were not high on Damiano’s list, but perhaps that’s to his credit. He wasn’t going to let a lack of an audience for his film stop him. 

The film does have a plot. It is about a bunch of seedy guys cynically producing a porn movie to make some quick cash. If this is some kind of meta-self-criticism I wonder if Damiano actually thought Let My Puppets Come would make money. Of course no one thought Deep Throat would be as popular as it was. Maybe Damiano thought he had some sort of secret sauce. Perhaps that isn’t the best choice of words.

How about this for meta. There is a scene where a puppet of Geppetto the puppet maker, is making a puppet of a black woman. The half made puppet comes to life while Geppetto is painting the face brown and asks Geppetto if he wants to party. The scene is either an example of a reflexive rendering of post-structural identity as filtered through race and theist creation ideology via pygmalion, or its the result of a lot of cocaine and whiskey.

They manage to work in several commercial parodies, some human actors, a cabaret number, random stock footage and what might be a ventriloquist but nothing can prepare you for when Pinocchio comes to life in a psychedelic, disco, bubble machine nightmare. There are singing doo-wop vagina’s with legs, a marionette and a possibly trans actor who sings about a transexual in a sort of cross between David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Abba.

In the end the fictional makers all get arrested, but are released when a judge deems their work to be “socially redeeming.” The cop that unlocks their cell exclaims “Socially redeeming my ass. Fucking is fucking!” A contemporary reworking of the famous Gertrude Stein poem no doubt.

As stupid and trivial as Let My Puppets Come is, it is an example of a nascent porn industry searching for its purpose. There were a whole swath of young directors who had chosen to illegally produce porn rather than produce nothing at all. After the 

Hayes code was repealed they were free to make movies for public consumption. The question was whether these new directors would try to make “real” “substantive”films featuring graphic sex, or just legal masturbation fodder.

Let My Puppets Come is a result of this confusion. By trying to be both art and porn it fails at both.
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