Better Than Expected if You Don't Expect Porn

God bless Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Years ago I saw their debut film, Cannibal: The Musical and knew that I was witnessing the next wave in American comedy. A sort of vulgar-one-moment, highbrow-the-next, anything goes, Zucker Brothers-meet-Troma film that made fun of 1940s musicals, Cannibal impressed the heck out of me.

Then came South Park and BASEketball and the rest, as they say, is history. Or that's what the Entertainment Tonight reporters would have you believe. But it's not quite that simple. In the years between Cannibal (which got picked up by Troma when nobody else would touch it) and BASEketball, Trey and Matt made a low-budget "porno superhero" flick, Orgazmo.

Trey is Joe Young, a Mormon missionary in southern California who winds up playing the hero in a hugely popular porno film, Orgazmo. Along with his sidekick, Choda Boy (Parker/Stone regular Dian Bachar awesome as usual), Joe is forced to become the real Orgazmo in order to fight evil pornographer Maxxx Orbison.

That's about it for the story. But that's okay because Orgazmo isn't about the story, it's about assaulting the viewer with as many jokes as possible in hopes that some of them will stick. While a majority of the laughs come from adult films and/or sexual practices (i.e. dildoes and Ron Jeremy), Parker and Stone also comedically assault Mormonism, kung-fu movies, sushi, Jesus, and filmmaking. As with South Park, no subject is taboo. Also like South Park the humor is hit and miss. But when you cram thousands of jokes in per hour a lot of them are bound to fail.

Orgazmo did receive a lot of pre-release hype due to the fact that it received an NC-17 rating, the equivalent of the MPAA committing boxoffice murder. While Orgazmo does deal with the world of X-rated movies, the only nudity it contains are a bunch of hairy, naked male asses (a running joke in the film is that any time female frontal nudity is about to happen , a guy's ass blocks the view).

I had less-than-stellar hopes for Orgazmo. While it was recently released theatrically, it has been playing film festivals for years and the word was that it was pretty abysmal. I was surprised, to say the least. I'm no prude, but I couldn't imagine that a comedy about porno could make me laugh so hard. But laugh I did. And - much to my surprise - so did my fiancee' who REALLY wasn't into seeing a movie called Orgazmo.

Sure, Orgazmo isn't out on video yet. But (even though I saw it in the theater and didn't feel TOO ripped off) it's the perfect film to view on video when it comes out. Lightweight, not too serious, but thoroughly entertaining despite its few flaws.

Matt Stone is hilarious as "Dave, the lighting guy" and look out for a great cameo by Lloyd Kaufman as a urologist.

- Trent Haaga