SAUSAGE PARTY

SAUSAGE PARTY is a raunchy, animated adult comedy about a bunch of food items that are alive and talking and the night-long adventures they undergo when they break free from the person who bought them. Filled with crude content and foul language, SAUSAGE PARTY has a strong pagan, immoral worldview marred further by a strong pro-atheist, anti-faith message.

The movie follows the adventures of a sausage named Frank (voiced by Seth Rogen, who also created the concept) who gleefully lives in a grocery store. Frank dreams of the day he can get purchased and make it to the Great Beyond, the outside world. He and the rest of the store’s alive-and-talking groceries believe they will enjoy a vibrant life of freedom on the outside, not knowing that, in fact, death by being eaten awaits them.

Frank also dreams of a relationship, with lots of sex mixed with a little romance, with a pretty hot dog bun voiced by Kristen Wiig. When the buns and hot dogs wind up in the same shopping cart, they’re excited that their dreams are about to become reality. Then, the shopping cart crashes into a door, and they are bounced out onto the store floor along with most of the other items.

Forced out into the store aisles or escaping into the outside world on their own, the various groceries engage in a night-long battle to find out what really awaits them in the outside world. They try to stay alive when an angry feminine-hygiene product goes on a rampage to kill the rest of them.

SAUSAGE PARTY looks great and has a style that’s truly unique to animated films. Its creation of a fully realized world inside the grocery store, where the Chinese food plays into Chinese stereotypes and the Mexican food wears sombreros and so on, is very funny and inventive. Rogen, who has in the past slipped conservative moral and political messages into some of his movies under layers of raunchiness, is out to destroy politically correct, left-oriented limitations on comedy here. Because every imaginable racial and ethnic group takes a comic hit, he pretty much gets away with it.

Sadly, however, the movie uses its animated status for an unbelievably gross and graphic array of sexual jokes, both verbal and visual. There is also a lesbian taco, who tries repeatedly yet unsuccessfully to woo the female hot dog bun. Later, a male bagel and a male lavash bread wind up having a homosexual relationship during an orgy among all the store items. Add in wall-to-wall casual profanity of every stripe, and SAUSAGE PARTY is definitely not a wholesome animated comedy. In fact, Rogen has publicly stated they created this as an animated movie with absurd non-human characters because they “knew they could get away with” having graphic sexual material.

Even worse, perhaps, the entire movie’s a thinly veiled endorsement of atheism and humanism. For example, the human “gods” that the groceries prayed to for freedom, and the Great Beyond of the outside world, are both proven false and repeatedly mocked. Any sense of faith is made to be a joke, and the message is to stop believing in any sort of a god and live in the now, for yourself. This unnecessary and callous stab at people of faith mars SAUSAGE PARTY beyond redemption.