Review: 'Sausage Party' Is an Insane Smorgasbord of Food Porn and Raunchy Humor

Hot dawg.

That’s as good a way as any to begin a discussion of Sausage Party, the libidinous, death-obsessed, R-rated cartoon featuring the voices of Seth Rogen and Kristen Wiig. It’s wild and funny. Also disturbing. Also borderline insane.

The story of a packaged hot dog, Frank (voice of Rogen), and Brenda (Wiig), the bun he loves (and would very much like to sleep with), Sausage Party ends – or, more to the point, climaxes – with a sexual orgy of processed, perishable foodstuffs, including a bagel (Ed Norton, doing a Woody Allen impersonation) and a lesbian taco (Salma Hayek), that comes close to literal food porn.

It crams in so many bizarre images of various forms of intercourse that you may have a hard time afterward recalling how long the segment lasts, or what exactly happens. Your unconscious will easily supply any images you might need regarding a hot dog and a bun (Brenda, in particularly, is shrewdly and perversely drawn, with her lips lining a vertical crease). The rest lurks in the mind like a subliminal memory that, you suspect and fear, may manifest itself inappropriately at some future date. Most likely while you’re operating heavy machinery.

But, as noted earlier, Sausage Party is as much about death as it is sex. Maybe more. The main thread of plot is this:

One day a jar of honey mustard (Danny McBride) is returned to the grocery store after being purchased. Placed back on the shelf, he is (so to speak) a shattered jar: On the outside, he’s seen horrors beyond comprehension, terrors that completely destroy the faith system of all manufactured food stuffs. They believe that, once scanned at checkout and bagged, they’re on their way to some undefined state of permanent bliss. Well, no.

They will be chopped, fried, boiled, roasted and bitten to pieces by the teeth of the hungry, masticating human beings who purchased them.

This truth sends frissons of terror up and down Frank’s taut skin, so far unblemished by blisters of charcoal-grill heat and unpunctured by fork prongs, and it seems to panic the movie itself. When it comes to depicting the realities of death, at least from the perspective of a hot dog and condiments, Sausage Party is as vividly, even slatheringly detailed as a Puritan tract ticking off the eternal pains of hell.

I actually had nightmares about one product’s suicide dive off a grocery cart.

The problem is that, dramatically speaking, there’s nowhere for a story to go if its starting point is the blood-congealing, spirit-killing thought of the self’s dissolution. There’s only the one other shoe you can drop. (And, yes, Frank wears shoes.)

Sausage Party comes up with an ingenious joke to sidestep this peculiar narrative dead end, but you may wish Frank had mustard – ahem, mustered – some of the dignity and moral courage of Bing Bong from Inside Out.

It’s as if Marcus Aurelius, instead of writing this:

“Think not disdainfully of death, but look on it with favor; for even death is one of the things that Nature wills.”

Had written:

“Oh my God, I am gonna freakin’ die! We are all gonna freakin’ die, people, and it’ll be awful! What am I gonna do?!?! Aw, man. Death!”