Movie Log: Orgazmo

I took a couple of Netflix discs off to my convention with me, and actually watched both of them. (Non-SF conferences seem to have essentially no nightlife, and my room had a DVD player hooked up to the TV.) The second was Orgazmo, which I'd not bothered to see for the previous decade. It could have waited even longer, but it was a pleasant enough thing to watch in a hotel room in a strange city.

This is a film by the South Park guys, made in the very early days of South Park. It's not as deliberately offensive as you might expect, even for a movie about a young Mormon guy who becomes a porn star. (Footnote 1: the movie treats Mormonism pretty respectfully, if flippantly. There's not even a hint of faith-losing; he stays pious throughout and that helps him win in the end. Footnote 2: he's not precisely a porn star, since he doesn't have sex on screen. Orgazmo softballs a lot of things you'd expect it to be vicious about.)

Orgazmo sees itself as a parody of a standard action movie, with a lot of obligatory scenes that are mildly funny at best. I've seen complaints that the acting is bad in Orgazmo, but I didn't find it so: broad, obvious, and self-parodying, yes, but deliberately so, and not thus "bad."

If you haven't seen this yet, and you were over eighteen when it came out, there's no good reason to see it now. It's a reasonable way to spend ninety minutes, but, in our current world of entertainment choices, I'd bet anybody could find three or four things they'd like better just on basic cable.