Seth Rogen's 'Sausage Party' Is Shockingly Outrageous

We caught a sneak preview of the R-rated animation. Here's our review.

Not Available Lead
Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

Not Available Lead

Sausage Party: It's not what you think.

Oh, who am I kidding? It's exactly what you think. Except worse. Way, way worse. Sausage Party comes from the fucked up minds of Seth Rogen and his frequent collaborators, Evan Goldberg, Kyle Hunter, and Ariel Shaffir, and is directed by Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon. The animated movie, Rogen's first, follows a pack of sausages at a grocery store trying to figure out what happens when they get picked for purchase and taken home by humans (here, they refer to them as "gods"). It's also got one of the most insane casts ever: Along with Seth Rogen himself, Kristen Wiig, Edward Norton, Salma Hayek, Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd, Michael Cera, Bill Hader, Nick Kroll, Craig Robinson, Danny McBride, James Franco, and David Krumholtz voice the various grocery store items.

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

I thought Sausage Party was mostly going to be an intentionally crude joke title that takes more of a Pixar turn. Like, "Hey you sickos, this is literally about sausages, get your mind out of the gutter!" I was very wrong. The film, which may start out with Pixar-esque innocence gets hot and heavy real quick with innuendo when the package of sausages (all dudes) and their neighboring hot dog buns (all ladies) start to flirt. Rogen's Frank and Wiig's sexy bun are like horny teenagers, eager to get purchased together so they can be taken out of their packaging and finally do the deed. The dirty talk comes on fast—insert every dick/sausage joke possible—and the bun even points out how, um, tight she is, because she hasn't been, um, opened up yet. I'm not sure when the first gasp came in, but the whole screening became a series of increasingly louder gasps and even louder, howling laughter. 

The grocery store items "grow up" believing that beyond the sliding doors, "the gods" take really good care of you. But after a shopping cart accident, which is dramatized as a tragic, violent massacre of spilled food items, Frank and co. find out maybe it's not so heavenly when they leave the store. 

Fallen out of their packages, Frank and his bun lady navigate their way through other aisles, all while running away from an evil douche—like, an actual, vagina-rinsing douche, voiced by Nick Kroll, fittingly. (Tell me the last time you saw an anthropomorphic douche in a movie.) They try to make it back into their packages so they can be chosen for heavenly grocery store after-life, but things take strange turns when they run into more items in parts of the grocery store they haven't been to before. Here's where the creators take the opportunity to make cheeky racial jokes: the Arabic flatbread and the Jewish bagel (voiced by Edward Norton imitating Woody Allen) of course hate each other, while Mexican food items, led by Salma Hayek's sexy taco, navigate through illegal tunnels, and a Native American bottle of Firewater (who says he had settled in the grocery store first before getting shoved in the backroom, ha) has beef with the crackers. It wasn't until he said "Fuck the crackers" did I realize why. There's also a group of Nazi sauerkraut that's responsible for "exterminating the juice" (during which point the guy next to me screamed one of his many "OH MY GOD"s that night).

Sausage Party hilariously touches on horror movie themes when all the food items get brutally murdered (i.e. eaten) as well as escape thriller and revenge porn, with a ton of expletives in between. The film stays pretty R-rated throughout, but even after a full movie of crude food, I was not prepared for that climactic final scene. I won't give anything away, because it's something you should see for yourself, but it's possibly the lewdest, most fucked up thing I've ever seen.

From sly, not-so-sly innuendo to unfiltered climaxes, there's not a moment in this movie that isn't packed with jokes. And the thing is, it works. I've never been a fan of R-rated animation comedy (the South Park movie mostly bummed me out), but Sausage Party nearly killed me. "We can all go to group therapy together," Seth Rogen said afterwards, if that's indicative of just how insane it was. When they started taking audience questions after the screening—questions filled with HOWs and WHYs—Rogen simply said, "Any good movie asks more questions than answers." I have a lot of questions. But let me take a breather first, 'cause I'm still wheezing from laughter. 

Sausage Party is out Aug. 12. DON'T take your kids to see it.

For more coverage of SXSW 2016, click here.

Latest in Pop Culture