Outrageous, offensive...and funny

Rating: Null/10 (1 July 1999)

I shrink from criticizing "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut". The movie is uncategorizable, except perhaps as comedy, I guess. It is appalling, outrageous, incredibly offensive...and in the end, very funny.
That's right, funny. I am probably one of the last people who would expect to find myself laughing at scenes of small, badly animated children uttering unbelievably foul dialogue in rapid succession, but "South Park" left me rolling on the floor sometimes. I am not too proud of all I laughed at, nor am I sure it is a good thing. It is an understatement to say that much of the humor in the movie pushes the boundaries of bad taste. It is certainly not for young children, which is of course the point of the movie, or as close as you will get to a point.
What plot there is follows the misadventures of the children of South Park, mainly Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny, in trying to get into an R-rated movie starring their heroes, off-color Canadian comedians Terrance and Philip, whose comedy centers mainly on shouting curses at each other and making bodily noises you would not likely hear at dinner parties. One thing leads to another, and soon President Clinton is issuing war against Canada, while Satan and recently departed Saddam Hussein carry on a affair fraught with communication issues. It doesn't matter how the movies gets there. In the meantime there are jabs, or better put, groin-kicks, against countless celebrities. I think I can recall Brian Dennehy, Brian Boitano, Wynona Ryder, the Baldwin brothers, and Bill Gates, just to name a few.
What is there to say about this movie, but that I laughed? I am familiar with its characters from the series, which I have watched only on occasion. Most of the laughs on the series were genuinely drawn, but the movie forced laughs out of me, partly from shock; I simply could not believe what I was seeing. The movie goes way, way over the top the way it pulls its punches, but it is certainly ambitious in its undertaking.
Expect to be offended. Many of the jokes are flat-out gross. These are the ones I laughed at. I also laughed at the ones that made fun of popular culture. This is fair game, in my opinion. I did not laugh at several jokes that were simply racially insensitive, to say the least. Those left me feeling unclean, and could have been left out without taking anything away from the movie.
I am told that the creators of South Park, who made this movie, did so largely to send a message to the Motion Picture Association of America, who is notorious for giving tougher ratings to movies with strong language than those that are blood-soaked. They have responded by creating a movie that contains heavy doses of both, with a smattering of gross-out humor. The result? A movie that Cartman would say "warped my fragile little mind!"