Movie Review – Cannibal – The Musical

Tweet

1993 – spoiler alerts. Just before creating South Park, Trey Parker & Matt Stone made this equally irreverent but obscure live action Western horror musical, which served as an expansion of a short film college project they worked on. Even before its full though still low key commercial release the film had become a cult classic, and it has become a popular stage show too, in some ways attracting audiences similar to those drawn to The Rocky Horror show. Plot wise, it is a spoof of Oklahoma, mixed with elements of the true story of the Doner Party. Parker himself (under the pseudonym Juan Schwartz) plays Alferd Packer, a clueless guide who leads a small moronic band of Mormon gold prospectors to a supposed El Dorado style gold mine in Colorado. Packer leads them in totally the wrong direction, getting them lost in the wilderness where they have a few adventures before near starvation leads them to desperate acts of cannibalism and murder for which Packer, as the only survivor, faces trial and hanging. The story is given in flashback as he awaits his fate. The songs are bizarrely cheerful, with the Shpadoinkle Day song parodying Oklahoma’s opening Oh What A Beautiful Morning, though I particularly enjoyed Let’s Build A Snowman, where one of the prospectors gets convinced that building snowmen will help take the men’s minds off the fear of freezing to death, right before they shoot him. The comedy is riotous, especially the Indians who are played by Japanese exchange students, complete with Japanese language, accents and martial arts skills and no effort to hide the fact. It is a gory film, opening with a caption stating that scenes of excessive violence have been censored an instant before cutting to a fight involving severed limbs and decapitations galore. The film’s growing reputation increased after South Park’s TV success and paved the way for Parker & Stone’s later irreverent musical The Book Of Mormon. Arthur Chappell