director
Trey Parker
screenwriters
Trey Parker
Matt Stone
producers
Fran Rubel Kuzui
Jason McHugh
John Frank Rosenblum
Matt Stone
cinematographer
Kenny Gioseffi
music
Paul Robb
editors
Michael R. Miller
Trey Parker
cast
Trey Parker (Joe Young/Orgazmo)
Dian Bachar (Ben Chapleski/Choda Boy)
Robyn Lynne (Lisa)
Michael Dean Jacobs (Maxxx Orbison)
Ron Jeremy (Clark)
David Dunn (A-Cup)
Matt Stone (Dave the Lighting Guy)
Masao Maki (G-Fresh)
mpaa rating: NC-17
running
time: 94m
u.s.
release: 10/23/98
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other trey
parker films
reviewed on this website:
- south
park: bigger, longer & uncut
- team
america: world police
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Trey Parker, co-mastermind
(with Matt Stone) of South Park and other nuclear bombs
dropped onto good taste, may be a whiz at sending up mainstream
entertainment, but that doesn't mean he doesn't love it at least
a little. Orgazmo, which was slapped with an NC-17 rating
for no very good reason other than occasional forensic dialogue
about porn-film practices, follows a self-consciously cheesy
heroic narrative. Joe Young (Parker himself) is a squeaky-clean
Mormon who needs to make some money to pay for his upcoming marriage
to the equally lily-white Lisa (Robyn Lynne). Going door-to-door
to spread the good word about Jesus, he stumbles onto the making
of a porn movie. The irascible director Maxxx Orbison (Michael
Dean Jacobs) unleashes his bodyguards on Joe, who makes short
work of them with his martial-arts skills. (Parker, the press
materials inform us, has a black belt in Tae Kwan Do.) Maxxx
gets an idea: He'll cast Joe as the titular hero of Orgazmo,
a low-rent superhero porno (his current Orgazmo is a klutzy wimp).
So Joe becomes Orgazmo, a masked avenger who zaps evildoers with
his Orgazmorator, which -- you guessed it -- subdues his foes
with debilitating petits morts.
The notion of a devoutly religious
dork rising to the top of the triple-X industry is a one-joke
premise, but the one joke is pretty good. In Orgazmo,
Parker gets to conflate the clichés of action flicks and
porno flicks, and the parody often comes close to appreciation.
Parker skewers the wooden acting of porn, though most of the
performances in the "straight" portion of the film,
with one or two exceptions, are pretty much on the same level.
Dian Bachar scores as Orgazmo's sidekick Choda Boy, in real life
an engineering geek named Ben who got into the industry for the
sex. The seen-it-all Ben makes a fine foil for the perpetually
horrified Joe, who more or less gets tossed into the deep end
of porn filmmaking. (He's been assured that he won't have to
perform any actual intercourse; for the money shots, several
progressively mismatching "stunt cocks" are called
in.) A particular scene-stealer is David Dunn as the foul A-Cup,
who considers himself the ultimate bad-ass and delights in waving
his own farts into people's faces. If Dunn isn't an alpha-male
jackass in real life, he sure as hell knows how to play one.
The plot thickens when Joe's
career as Orgazmo takes off; his video sells by the ton, winning
AVN awards left and right, and even appears on legit magazine
covers. Meanwhile, Joe is paralyzed with fear that pure innocent
Lisa may discover how Joe's been earning that wedding money (he
tells her he's starring in a sequel to Death of a Salesman).
In another plot thread, local goons are threatening the sushi
bar of a Japanese hip-hop wannabe who calls himself G-Fresh (Masao
Maki), and Joe outfits himself with a real, working Orgazmorator
and hits the streets with Choda Boy. Throughout all this, Parker
(as an actor as well as writer/director) invests Joe with a wide-eyed
sincerity that the movie half goofs on and half admires. Mormons
don't come in for much bitch-slapping in Orgazmo; Parker
respects people who are serious and devout about their religion
without being judgmental assholes about it. As in all his other
work, there's a sweetness in Orgazmo that leavens the
smutty stuff. The movie even manages to be anti-porn-industry
(the guys who run it can be dangerous sleazeballs) without really
being anti-porn. Anyone renting the movie hoping
for porn, or even NC-17 arousal, is in for a disappointment:
Whenever one of the porn actresses is about to disrobe, some
guy's ugly, pimply ass moves into frame to cover the female nudity.
If the NC-17 rating hadn't hurt Orgazmo's chances at decent
distribution (it ended up being a cult video), Parker might have
enjoyed the irony that a movie with nary a nipple could break
through the R-rated envelope.
Orgazmo is uneven and scrappy, but that's
part of its point and its charm. Any movie that finds room for
the character Sancho, who announces at every opportunity that
he...is Sancho (and doesn't do anything else), earns itself
a small spot in my heart. The film also gave a legitimacy-hungry
Ron Jeremy a chance to act in a flick that didn't involve him
spurting all over someone, and the script (by Parker and an uncredited
Stone, who appears as the lighting guy who prefaces every statement
with "I'm not queer or nothin', but...") has its share
of Parker-esque surreal divertissements, like Choda Boy's
renunciation of his deadly Hamster Style fighting, which you
know he'll break out again at a key moment at the end. As for
the special "unrated" version found on the DVD? Even
seasoned scientists studying the two versions in a lab might
not find much difference between them; you certainly won't get
any lost female nudity, though you might get a few extra seconds
of some guy's hairy ass.
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