Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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57 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cannibal! The Musical: Best Director's Track Ever, March 25, 2000
The movie itself is a great bit of inspired gross lunacy that you'd probably expect from the South Park team (Parker and Stone). It's a homage to the old Hollywood movie musicals like Oklahoma, but it's about a true story of cannibalism in Colorado Territory before it became a state. You wil not be disappointed: the movie is a hoot, and the songs are terrifyingly catchy. But the DVD special features are extraordinary, and the director's commentary audio track is worth the price of the disc alone. Parker gets together with Stone and many other stars of the movie, they announce their intention to drink heavily during their commentary, and proceed to do just that. A constant stream of hilarious behind-the-scenes anecdotes, the complete low-down on Lianne (the girl who broke Parker's heart and inspired a lot of the movie's content), and a lot of jovial abuse of the movie itself (they cheerfully admit they were 22 and didn't know what they were doing half the time). The banter among the commentators is lightning fast, uniformly profane, and unbelievably funny. I wanted to split a bottle of whiskey with these guys before I heard the director's commentary, and now I have to at least once before I die. The cast and Troma should be proud: this is what all DVDs with Special Features should aspire to. I can only hope that Parker stages a similar event for the as-yet-unavailable Orgazmo disc (when, Trey, when?).
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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A magical rendition of the historical Alfred Packer story, October 13, 1999
By A Customer
Trey Parker of South Park fame makes his acting and directing debut in this strange and hilarious take on the life and times of one Alfred Packer, a man accused of multiple murders and cannibalisim in the rough days of mining, trapping, and open frontiers. It tells the story from Packers point of view, and follows his journey to find his best friend, an arabian mare named leeann. Continuous idocy and hilarity result when he and his band of miner wannabes meet trappers, indians, and get stuck in the wilderness during the middle of winter. Note: the horse jokes are his way of getting even with and old girlfriend of the same name.
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27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
It's a Shpadinkle Trey Parker pre-"South Park" musical, November 27, 2004
If you have never sat all the way through a Troma film or have never found anything about "South Park" to be funny, then do not bother to watch "Cannibal! The Musical," because you are not going to enjoy it. Matt Stone is around in 1993 when this film was made (but not released to mass consumption until 1996), but Trey Parker gets the primary credit for not only writing the script and songs, but also directing and starring as Alfred Packer (and the Cow Bell Guy).
In 1873 Packer and five prospectors were snowbound, lost and hungry in the San Juans of Colorado. Only Packer returned alive and when the other bodies were discovered it was clear they had been eaten. Parker was eventually convicted of murder and not cannibalism, although Colorado lore likes to claim he was "the only man in U.S. history ever convicted of cannibalism." At the University of Colorado at the grill at the Student Union is named the Alferd Packer Grill (the spelling of Packer's first name is but one of several points of dispute in the story).
Parker and Stone were students at Colorado and so it is not surprising that Parker would turn Packer story into a musical. The film was originally entitled "Alfred Packer: The Musical", but Troma's owner Lloyd Kaufman argued for the name change because while Packer is a legendary figure in Colorado, his cannibalistic claim of fame is little known outside of the state.
Actually, there is not as much cannibalism as you would think in this movie, and there are certainly enough songs. The latter is the bigger complaint, because the songs are the best part of the film and the funniest parts as well. The humor outside of the songs is just not that ambitious: the best bits are the Nihonjin "Indians" being played by Japanese (with "Nihonjin" being Japanese for "Japanese") and the debate as to whether "The Trapper Song" was in F sharp major or E flat minor (as the relative major of F sharp with the relative minor being three half-tones down). And if you do not know that the lead characer is going to be offered fudge at some point, you have just not been thinking ahead. The good news is that when you get to the "Finger Food" extras you can go back and do the songs, not only as they appear in the film but also as performed in a live version of "Cannibal! The Musical" by the Dad's Garage Theater Copany.
As he proved in "South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut," Parker can master the nuances of the musical forms identified with both Broadway and popular song. It is hard not to think of Curly opening "Oklahoma" when Parker as Packer shows up and starts singing:
The sky is blue and all the leaves are green.
The sun's as warm as a baked potato.
I think I know precisely what I mean,
When I say it's a shpadoinkle day.
My favorite song has to be "Ode to Liane" (a.k.a. "When I Was on Top of You"), which Packer ostensibly sings to his horse, but which Parker apparently wrote to revenge himself on an ex-girlfriend who obviously did not know what sort of person she had dumped (she also contributes to her own demise by doing the choreography for the big finale and dancing in it as well). I also like "This Side of Me," sung by reporter Polly Pry (Toddy Walters), which is a sweet little song about a woman's forgotten side, until one little line in the final chorus skews it a wee bit. The "Trapper Song" and the big finale, "Hang the Bastard!" are the big productive numbers, relatively speaking. It really is much more of a Cowboy musical than a cannibal music (notice the lowercase "c" for "cannibal") and once you understand that you can stop closing your eyes in anticipation of the eating of human flesh.
As you would expect the DVD is loaded with extras that exaggerate the importance of this film, including Parker, Stone and several other cast members who gather together to get drunk while watching the movie. But if you can take a three-minute trailer as a joke for film class and then raise enough money to actually make a movie that gets sold to Troma, home of "The Toxic Avenger," that is your basic American success story. It was because of this movie that Parker and Stone were able to go to Hollywood and eventually end up doing be "South Park" and thereby corrupting a much larger segment of America's youth than are ever going to stumble on this movie. Finally, if you are looking for some sort of profound and deep meaning to all of this, I would refer you to the lyrics of "Let's Build a Snowman! Part I," which evince a sense of relativism that usually found in the current post-modernism tradition:
Sometimes, the world is black.
And tears run from your eyes.
And maybe we'll all get really sick.
And maybe we'll all die.
So...
Let's build a snowman!
We can make him our best friend.
We can name him Tom or we can name him George!
We can make him tall, or we can make him not so tall.
Snowman!
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