For grown-up animaniacs, South Park is an antidote to both Disney’s creatively gutted attempts at realism and the one-size-fits-all happy ending. But that doesn’t mean it’s an easy pill to swallow.
Contrary to ad promises, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone were forced to cut scenes from this bigger, longer movie in order to get an R-rating. And seeing the remains – which include Saddam Hussein throwing dildos at his lover Satan – makes it hard to imagine what they took out.
As the movie’s commentary on censorship gropes in the darkest chasms of culture and history for analogies, it gets so reckless it gets its message stuck in its medium. Of course, the two might taste great together – depending on your level of tolerance for flatulence jokes and elementary school kids singing about giving hand jobs for crack.
Stan, Kyle, Kenny and Cartman sneak into a theater to see an R-rated Canadian movie called Asses of Fire, which features two scrawny figures with a penchant for igniting farts. Kenny is mortally wounded outside the theater when he tries to follow suit. But he doesn’t die until a surgeon (voice of George Clooney) accidentally puts a baked potato in his chest during heart transplant surgery. The three survivors show up at school the next day throwing around more obscenities than Andrew Dice Clay doing stand-up.
After a failed attempt to deprogram the kids, Kyle’s Mom forms the MAC (Mothers Against Canadians) to protect the town’s children from all things Canadian. They could have burned all the Celine Dion and Bryan Adams records and everything would have been fine.
But the anti-Canadian campaign turns into a full-scale war, which starts when the Canadian Air Force bombs the Baldwin mansion while the famous actor brothers are sunbathing. In retaliation, the MAC captures Asses of Fire stars Terence and Philip.
As it turns out, Terence and Philip are actually part of an Armageddon prophecy. If they are killed by the MAC, Satan and Saddam will be allowed to rise and rule the world. So it’s up to the South Park kids and the Mole (a third-grade atheist mercenary with a French accent) to save their Canadian movie heroes from death and the world from Satan’s evil plot, which they discover when Kenny’s ghost returns from Hell to warn them.
South Park is guilty of its own happy sort of ending. Then again, any ending is happy after more than an hour of exaggerated bodily functions, hearing the word "fuck" as a mantra, MAC Nazi death camps and a USO show featuring Big Gay Al warming up the crowd for a public execution.
All plans are foiled when Kyle’s mom shoots Terence and Philip in the head. But the world is saved anyway, because Satan has given up his ambitions to rule the universe. Instead, he returns to his pit of fire to read more self-help books and, probably, stay out of movies like this one.
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