# Cannibal! The Musical (1996)

### reviewed by
Cheng-Jih Chen

    "The sky is blue, and all the leaves are green!"

On Wednesday, instead of watching a Very Special Star Trek: Voyager (where, I think from the promos, Busty Borg is kidnapped by other Borg in order to assimilate WonderBra technology), we had, on hand, "Cannibal! The Musical". This is an early Trey Parker/Matt Stone film. I had heard of it before, in the same way I heard about the "Spirit of Christmas", but seeing it is a different experience.

When the South Park movie (tentatively titled "Bigger, Longer and Uncut") comes out, I hope they adopt the Star Wars Episode I movie posters, but with Cartman and Kyle casting the shadows of Alfred Parker and James Humphrey against a snow drift. Truly, the spirit of South Park can be glimpsed through the musical numbers and the cannibalism. During a campfire scene, you can hear an early version of Cartman's whining. "When I Was On Top of You" is a direct ancestor of Chef's "Simultaneous". The cheesy cheapness of everyone wearing plaid shirts, jeans and fake racoon skin hats parallels the cardboard cutouts that are the essense of the animation. The backdrops of the Rockies that are in every outdoors scene of South Park is the location of the desolate miners' camp, before the cannibalism begins. Most of all, the little Brannif jingle after the credits is the main theme to the film. Now we know the words: "The sky is blue, and all the leaves are green!"

The movie itself is the true story of Alfred Parker, who was convicted of murder and cannibalism in the late 19th Century, when a group of miners he led through the Rockies failed to, well, come out of the mountains with him. A picture of his grave and a blurb can be found at: http://www.csn.net/~nulevich/graves/packer.html. The story, though, isn't told in a solemn Ken Burns/PBS documentary sort of way, with sepia-toned daguerreotypes and John Chancellor narrating. This story is told in song.

The evocative power of song and dance is only rarely recongized now, with the standard American musical dead of old age. In an episode last season of "Xena: Warrior Princess", both the sturm-und-drang and the deep tenderness of Xena and Gabriel's relationship could only be properly expressed in this form: this critical story, the producers saw rightly, could only adequately told with elaborate production numbers. The Parker/Stone film is no different. The emotional breadth of "Cannibal!" can only be properly captured in song; the disparate characters are made flesh by what they sing. From the miners' high hopes in "That's All I'm Asking For", the desperately cheery "Snowman", the declaration of a man's love for his horse in "When I Was On Top of You" and Packer's leitmotif of "Shpadoinkle Day" [sic], the characters become individuals in our eyes. Unlike, say, the anonymous masses that get mowed down in the average Schwarzenegger film, the miners become familar, and we feel a pang of sorry when they're chopped up and eaten. It's like the emotional impact of John Sayle's "Matewan", but with BBQ sauce.

In any case, this is a very funny movie, utterly absurd. And it's actually less gross than it sounds, though that's not saying much.

The tape we had was rented from Kim's Video downtown. I don't expect the local Blockbusters to carry it. Unfortunately, Troma hasn't gotten around to releasing the DVD.

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