IndieWire owes our readers an apology. Last week, in a moment of desperate optimism and/or extreme naïveté, this critic declared “Mile 22” was “far and away the worst summer movie of 2018.” And while that statement was true at the time, it failed to account for the unfathomable awfulness that one of the season’s final studio offerings had in store.

I foolishly assumed an incoherent and jingoistic Mark Wahlberg vehicle that climaxes with someone telling him to “say hi to your mother for me” would be the most eye-punishing, soul-crushing, career-questioning thing I’d have to sit through until at least after Labor Day. And then, I saw “The Happytime Murders.”

An admirably debased but deeply unfunny Muppet noir that opens with a porn-addicted bunny getting his head blown off, it peaks with a Robert De Niro-inspired puppet ejaculating silly string all over his office, and presumably ends...