And though a song whose refrain is, more or less, "Shut your flicking face, Uncle Flicka" would seem to have little room for musical wit, ace arranger Marc Shaiman turns it into an Oklahoma hoedown, with kids chirping like obscene Chipmunks.ĭid we say obscene? Be warned: the raunch is nonstop and often noxious. There's a dexterous quartet of musical themes, a la Les Miz. Satan has a hilariously solemn ballad in the Disney-cartoon mode like the Little Mermaid, he wants to be Up There. Saddam could be an Arabic fiddler on the roof as he struts his seedy charm in I Can Change. Cartman's perky Kyle's Mom's a Bitch echoes Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, with choruses in fake Chinese, Dutch and French. But director Trey Parker (who wrote the film with Matt Stone and Pam Brady) figured he'd turn South Park into a wall-to-wall musical: 14 tunes, each evoking a familiar Broadway style. It takes a children's crusade-La Resistance-to get to the final rainbow.Īll that and a gigantic talking clitoris should be enough for a short feature. Meanwhile, Kenny (the dead one) goes to hell, where Satan and Saddam lurk. The South Park moms blame Canada, and in a trice we're war-ready.
The lads see a movie starring their favorite Canadian gross-out comics, Terrance and Phillip, and parrot the naughty language. A bit more is at stake this time: the fate of the world.
The kids are still here: Stan, Kyle, Kenny and Cartman, the quartet of cut-out third-graders in the "quiet little redneck podunk white-trash mountain town" of South Park, Colo. It confounds those who suspected that the explosive blips of the South Park fad were ready to flatline and that a feature film-likely to bore the faithful and annoy everyone else-was the surest way to do a Conan off the window ledge of the show's fading notoriety.
Also anyone who lacks a bottomless tolerance for inspired comic rudeness.įor the South Park film is that happy surprise, an idea that is enriched as it expands from 20 minutes of TV time to 80 movie minutes. A short list would include celebrities teased in the movie: the Baldwin brothers (they are killed en masse by the Royal Canadian Air Force) Conan O'Brien (he commits suicide by jumping from the GE Building) Winona Ryder (she performs an unusual exercise with Ping-Pong balls) Bill Gates (he is shot dead because Windows 98 isn't fast enough) Saddam Hussein (he has a gay affair with Satan and toys shamelessly with the Horned One's affections) Barbra Streisand (for all the old reasons) Liza Minnelli (don't ask) and God (who is vilified by one of the movie's guest kid heroes). People should probably skip South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, the new feature based on the Comedy Central cartoon series.