Very loosely based on a book by Roald Dahl, Netflix’s The Twits features a couple of the worst people you can imagine waging war on a little girl and her orphanage. And while the film comes with some positive messages, the bathroom humor pushes the film’s PG rating.
The Twits are terrible.
No, scratch that: Terrible is simply too mild a descriptor. Horrible? Not quite. Vile? Maybe we’re getting closer. Credenza and Jim Twit are so abominably appalling that Genghis Khan would consider them a little too much. Grout mold would make for a better dinner guest. After all, mold won’t steal your silverware and spit in your soup.
The Twits “hate everything,” we’re told. “Especially each other.”
You would not think the Twits would be the best candidates to run an amusement park. And they’re not. Still, they gave said park the ol’ Twit try. They built a whirligig out of Porta-potties, made a bouncy pit from fly-infested mattresses and filled several acres with rides that might trigger heart attacks just by looking at them. And they powered them all with tears—tears from magical (and stolen) Muggle-Wumps.
Yes, the Twits were very much hoping to draw millions of patrons through the Twitlandia gates, rob them blind (through outrageous ticket prices) and fondly bid adieu to any who survived. But the city of Triperot isn’t having it: Police close the place down on opening day, due to a host of safety violations and for smelling like “rancid hot dog meat.”
The Twits are, naturally, furious. (Well, more furious; for Jim and Credenza, a day without fury is a day without a sunrise.) Rancid hot dogs?! They seem to say. We’ll give you rancid hot dogs! So they steal a truck filled with liquid hot dog meat, pump it into Triperot’s water system and cause a pink, gooey catastrophe.
But even though the Twits park the stolen hot dog truck right on their property, the police seem at a loss as to who might’ve unleashed the frightening frankfurter flood.
That doesn’t sit well with Beesha, a young, idealistic girl in Triperot’s foster care system. So she and her best friend, Bubsy, trek on over to the Twits to find out what’s up.
The visit goes as well as Beesha could’ve hoped. The Twits don’t just confess their latest evil deed: They positively brag about it. Moreover, Beesha and Bubsy discover the Muggle-Wumps, steal the key to their cage, let those poor little critters out and narrowly escape. Oh, and thanks to Beesha’s investigation, the police arrest the Twits and throw them in the slammer.
Nothing like a happy ending, right?
Alas, the Twits hate everything—especially happy endings. And they plan to write their own ending to this little drama.
As mentioned, Beesha and Bubsy are part of the town’s foster care system, and they live in an orphanage with a lot of other kids. Beesha takes it upon herself to fill the role of mother as best as she can—caring for all the younger charges in the orphanage and serving as a source of strength and kindness. (Mr. Napkin, the head of the orphanage, is a well-meaning but rather meek sort, so he’s not much help when things get tough.)
Furthermore, Beesha can understand what the Muggle-Wumps are saying—a sign of “deep empathy,” according to the movie. Beesha matches that empathy with plenty of courage, too: Tangling with the Twits is serious business, but she never backs down, even when the odds—and the town—turn against her. She’s determined to protect the Muggle-Wumps and the orphans to the best of her ability.
After liquid hot dog meat floods Triperot, the town’s mayor (Mayor John John-John) insincerely offers his “thoughts and prayers” to those impacted.
As mentioned, Muggle-Wumps’ tears are “magical,” and it turns out their saliva has some healing properties as well. But later events suggest that the “magic” in the Muggle-Wumps’ bodily fluids are products of chemistry, not anything supernatural.
We hear that the Twits have been married for “47 miserable years.” Credenza Twit bears just a bit of cleavage, and her animated denim skirt rides a little high.
We see a guy wearing just a pair of white underwear briefs and one sock. “Well, glad I decided to put on briefs this morning,” the man says. We see that same man wear a rather effeminate hat in a photograph.
The Twits regularly smack each other around. It all comes across as very slapstick and silly in this animated form, but if replicated in a live-action movie, it would likely trigger a lot of thoughts about domestic abuse.
The Twits’ house is filled with dangerous elements, too, from sharp, whirling blades to impossibly long drops—and both the Twits and kids are occasionally imperiled by these elements. An entire room is filled with taxidermized animals (which saddens and creeps out the kids). And we learn that the Twits routinely capture birds in the area by slapping glue on branches and other surfaces. (One bird skeleton lies in a pool of glue.)
The Twits opens with the titular antagonists stuck to the floor, by their heads, in that same sort of glue. We see and hear about what happens if you stand on your head too long: The Twits call the experience the “dreaded shrinks,” and eventually the body of the victim collapses in on itself until it disappears entirely.
We hear that Loompaland, where the Muggle-Wumps come from, is a violent and deadly place. A popular Muggle-Wump lullaby is mostly about “monsters eating your face off and ripping out your guts and stuff,” according to young Mandy Muggle-Wump, and we’re treated to some rather grim lines from the song. (Scary shadows on the wall augment the song’s lyrics.) Mary Muggle-Wump, Mandy’s mother, often talks about gnawing the elbows off of someone. And later in the movie, we see a vision of Loompaland itself: People are devoured by a huge frog.
Someone’s rear end explodes—the force of which breaks windows and, according to those in the vicinity, “burns” skin. We later hear the exploder is undergoing emergency surgery to replace his lost buttocks, and we see him in traction—his bandaged rear end comically enlarged.
Beesha suffers a cut that a Muggle-Wump heals. People are blasted by fire extinguishers and repelled by spray cheese; they fall from high windows and are assaulted by, essentially, living hair balls. Explosions destroy a good many structures. The Twits threaten to eat both Muggle-Wumps and children. Credenza Twit considers herself famous for her bird pies; one potential customer receives a pie with a still-living bird in it, and the creature pops his head out of the crust.
We hear a variation of the word “crap” and two misuses of God’s name. Outside of those instances, the worst we hear are uses of “heck,” “butt,” “jeez” and “gosh dang.” Someone uses the word “snozzing” as a potential f-word stand-in. Characters engage in some creative but crude name-calling.
Beesha and Bubsy meet a “Sweet-Toed Toad” during the course of their adventures. We learn that the toad’s toes secrete a substance that, when licked, causes the licker to act opposite of how he or she normally would. While under the toes’ influence, a few characters appear to be intoxicated.
The Twits predicates about half its jokes on crude gags and bathroom humor. And since we’ve already mentioned it, let’s discuss the exploding rear end.
Eating a sabotaged cake leads to the blow-up in question, and the film treats it in part like a huge blast of flatulence. (The “burning” sensation that some experience, the film suggests, is more a result of the smell and chemical discharge than any physical loss of posterior.) Another running joke involves confusion between the words “diarrhea” and “diorama.” The film uses burps and flatulence repeatedly as ways to draw a chuckle, and toilets figure prominently everywhere. (When Beesha and Bubsy find a toilet in the Twits’ bedroom, Bubsy speculates that they may have small bladders.)
The meat flood the Twits cause is intentionally grotesque and called “One of the worst liquid hot dog meat floods in our nation’s history.” Mr. and Mrs. Twit play plenty of gag-worthy pranks on each other: They choke on fake eyeballs and are tricked into eating worms. They literally spit those worms into each other’s mouths repeatedly.
But the Twits aren’t just disgusting. They’re mean. They lie, steal and cheat far too often to tabulate every bit of it here. At one point Mr. Twit tells his wife, “I’d say it’s high time to start making promises we have no intention of keeping.” Those promises convince a good chunk of Triperot to join in their crazy schemes. They also adopt children—but only to press them into a Twitlandia song-and-dance number.
Marty Muggle-Wump (husband to Mary and father to Mandy) gets nervous. And when he does, he tends to “barf up stress balls.” Those balls of fluff quickly grow eyes and sometimes arms, and they become weaponized forces for resistance.
The entire tale of The Twits is told by a mama flea to her kid. And when the child flea begins to protest the story’s convoluted beginning, the mother says, “You’re the one who’s always telling me that you want your bedtime stories to be more emotionally complex with, and I’m quoting, ‘highbrow themes and lowbrow comedy.’”
And yes, that—especially the “lowbrow comedy” part—fairly sums up Netflix’s The Twits.
Roald Dahl published a book called The Twits in 1980—but Netflix takes so many liberties with the story that it only claims its movie was “inspired by the characters.”
But steering away from a word-for-word retelling may be, on balance, a good thing. Dahl was reportedly inspired to write The Twits because of his hatred for beards (Mr. Twit sports a huge one), and the book ends on a rather grim (albeit humorous) note. The novel’s moral, if anything, would be, “Don’t be a jerk, especially to birds.”
By contrast, the Netflix version of The Twits lands in slightly less vengeful, slightly more hopeful territory. In spite of the horrors the Twits put Beesha through, she ends her own part of the story by committing an act of kindness. “Hate’s easy,” she says. “But it’ll eat you up inside.” It’s one of several sweet messages found here: messages about family, empathy, wishful thinking, the importance of careful discernment and so much more.
But those messages come coated in the equivalent of liquid hot dog goop. The Twits doesn’t have a single adult human role model to speak of; only Mr. Napkin comes within shouting distance. This film does indeed love its “lowbrow comedy,” and it can sink as low as a flea’s knee. The Twits also has more toilet humor than I can ever remember in a PG film.
That makes The Twits a decidedly mixed bag. You might love your kids to internalize some of the movie’s more positive messages, but it’d be nice to do without the exploding rear end.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
