I took a slight break from South Park to fanboy about Guardians of the Galaxy for about half a week, but I'm back, and at this point I've finished the movie Bigger, Longer & Uncut and the fourth season. This review will be focusing on just the film.
Bigger, Longer & Uncut came out about mid-way through the third season of the show, and for that I am impressed at how great the movie is and how consistently good the third season is, because it means they had to have been making the movie between the second season and the third, while the third was airing. So not only were they making a feature length movie, they also were producing new episodes of the tv show weekly, and the quality of both things were surprisingly unhindered by this.
The basic plot of the movie is based on the season one episode Death, in which Kyle's mom finds Terrance and Phillip to be too vulgar for people to be watching and organizes a group to get the show taken off the air. Of course, being the movie version where anything goes, the movie takes this plot and takes it to absolute extremes. In the film, Terrance and Phillip release their first movie which happens to be R-rated, and the boys sneak into the film. Filled with vulgarities and situations too adult for their age-range, the boys take everything they heard and saw back home with them and introduces all the adults to the new colorful insults they've learned. When Kyle's mom hears of it, she decides to take a stand and tries to eradicate the effects of Terrance and Phillip from the town of South Park. When this doesn't work and the boys and all the other kids see the movie again, Kenny attempts to recreate a stunt from the movie, and when he dies as a result, Mrs. Broflovski creates a rallying cry to blame Canada for producing Terrance & Phillip, as a misguided attempt at removing the blame from anyone actually responsible for Kenny's death. Soon, the United States capture Terrance and Phillip and plan to publicly execute them before going to war with Canada. All that and more happen in this wacky, raunchy, musical.
Anyone with more than a passing knowledge of South Park know that it's creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone love the idea of story telling through musicals, and this is their first big attempt at such a thing. After having watched the first three seasons I could totally see them doing this, as each season has had it's share of catchy songs and musical numbers, whether it be from Isaac Haye's Chef or the boys themselves. Without a 20 minute time constraint it made sense that they could take that love of irreverent musical numbers and stretch them out to full-length songs for this movie, and they are what really sets this apart from being just 5-ish episodes of the show stitched together.
The animation is a little nicer, and you can tell they had a budget to hire some extra people to work on the Hell sequences which look great, but what really makes the movie great is that it really just feels like an extenuation of the show. Because the movie is animated the same way as the show is, you don't get any change in quality between the two, a problem that often plagues movies that come from tv shows. The only thing that's really different between the show and the movie is that the movie can get away with things they couldn't on cable tv and it's feature length. Parker and Stone have this wonderful, comfy environment they have set up of the South park universe and they still give you that but continue to expand upon it, giving us the character of Satan and some wonderful gags like Cartman's V-chip that never would have and still couldn't work on cable tv.
In the end, the film is a fun romp through the South Park universe with songs that are surprisingly clever and catchy for being so raunchy or irreverent. It really showed us what Parker and Stone were capable of when given a feature running time and the ability to be fully uncensored, and made a movie all about how censorship and blaming the media gets blown out of proportion in today's society.
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