Orgazmo / Cannibal the Musical
Orgazmo is not an NC17 movie. I actually saw this at a test screening in June or July and signed a paper saying I was not a reviewer and that I would not tell anyone what I thought. Well the freakin movie is released now, all bets are off. The friend I saw the movie with agreed with me that there was nothing NC17 about the movie, but it was likely the church would picket it. Well, it is certainly, from a religious right standpoint, more worthy of picketing than The Last Temptation of Christ, but it’s not very harmful. I could be wrong, coming from my background, but I also don’t picket movie theatres – I tell you what to spend and then I let you make the choice.
It is a silly, funny, pleasant movie about a Mormon (Trey Parker) who accidentally becomes a porn star, Orgazmo. It has no real nudity at all but LOTS of very graphic talk the likes of which I had forgotten since my college days. It is very very very sarcastic in its representation of religion in general and more specifically, the church of Jesus Christ and his Latter Day Saints, aka The Mormons. To Trey Parker (yes, that Trey Parker, the cute one)’s credit, Mormons are not depicted as evil, like many church bashing comedies tend to do, but they are depicted as hopelessly out of touch with their bodies and therefore with reality or fun. However you will take that, do, but Orgazmo is still no NC 17 movie by a long shot. There is more skin on Melrose Place and more graphic talk…well, OK, nowhere else. But it’s just talk. It’s also a great parody of the silly fringe genre porno movies, the ones that turn out material like Edward Penishands, and Grosse Pointe Spankings.
The concept of the film, a Mormon “accidentally” becoming a porn star, is quite silly, and there are no boners, er bones about that. It is very silly, and quite funny and quite uplifting, too, in it’s hell-in-a-handbasket way. If you don’t know what a choda is (and our test audience almost universally did not, despite the star’s sidekick being named ChodaBoy), it’s the perineum, aka the ’tain’t. Look it up. I am alarmed to admit that I recognized some genuine porn actors in the movie with cameos and one even with the coveted role of the Sperminator or some such bad guy. Well, I do have a male roommate! Porn happens. Knowing that these people were actual porn stars, however, lent the film a cachet I am certain it did not intend – that of pretender to the Boogie Nights throne, a gentle movie about the rigors of the porn industry. I dug it overall, it’s just not all that good. Better than your average Troma film, that is certain.
Re-released only a month or so earlier, Cannibal the Musical (another Trey Parker and Matt Stone venture from a few years back) is another example of simple comedy turned merely amusing. It’s silly and definitely low rent, just for laughs, but also kind of endearing. An 1883 band of explorers vanishes and only one man survives, and he tells his tale of woe from jail, largely in song and flashback, as would be expected. Parker has a nice singing voice, actually, and it’s hard to imagine Mr. Garrison being much of a singer. Unlike what I heard about Baseketball, Cannibal and Orgazmo are only using the lads’ fame to get bankrolled, not suck in audience hoping to hear a Cartman impression. I predict Orgazmo and Cannibal will eventually get some play on cable and then win their following, as the silly, enjoyable but still probably pretty offensive future cult favorites they seem destined to become.
Orgazmo
MPAA Rating BC-17-language, drug use, crude sexual humor, blasphemy, what else?
Release date 10/23/98
Time in minutes 90
Director Trey Parker and Matt Stone
Studio October Films
Cannibal the Musical
MPAA Rating R-violence, drug use, brief nudity I think too
Release date 1996
Time in minutes 92
Director Trey Parker and Matt Stone
Studio October Films
