Trey Parker and Matt Stone may well have the dirtiest minds in show business, but they play naïve remarkably well. From Parker's chipper, showtune-belting version of Alfred Packer in Cannibal!: The Musical to the boys of South Park, Parker and Stone have made a career out of mixing wide-eyed innocence with the foulest humor they can think up, and getting giggles out of the contrast. The technique practically became a thesis statement in Orgazmo, the duo's low-budget 1996 cult hit about a clean-cut Mormon (played by Parker) who gets roped into making a porn film. The new "unrated special edition" double-DVD set piles on the extras with a quantity-over-quality mentality that means a lot of slogging to get to the occasional good parts, but the film itself holds up well. It's sloppy, it's minor, and it has the lurchy pacing of a student movie, but like Parker and Stone's best work, it goes over the top without regret or restraint, viewing its own excesses through the eyes of a shocked, innocent audience stand-in, and the results are often hilarious.
Orgazmo opens with Parker proselytizing in Beverly Hills, but dreaming of returning to Utah to marry his perky fiancée (Robyn Lynne). When his mission work interrupts a porn shoot, the director (Michael Dean Jacobs) casually orders his guards to emasculate Parker, who defends himself with surprising kung-fu skills. Impressed, Jacobs offers Parker $20,000 for two days' work as a costumed porn superhero. Tempted by the opportunity to finance Lynne's dream wedding, Parker takes the role, on the condition that a "stunt cock" be called in for the sex scenes. A weak late-film twist requires Parker to become a real superhero, but for the most part, Orgazmo gets its jollies by mocking the conventions and foibles of cheap porn (with in-jokes including a bevy of real porn stars, including Ron Jeremy and Chasey Lain), and by watching the squeaky-clean Parker cringe at every new moral compromise.
The DVD set devotes hours to drunken, incoherent, badly mixed audio commentaries, plus outtakes, awkward interviews, and draggy documentaries, and it presents the film itself in two barely different cuts, the NC-17 take and the unrated version. There's some fun to be had in the extensive deleted scenes, especially in a lengthy comic money-shot sequence reminiscent of the bomb-disposal setpiece from the 1966 Batman. But in spite of Parker's howling commentary-track claims that he cut all the best parts of the film, Orgazmo is better off in its shorter incarnation. Like all of Parker and Stone's work, it's already uneven and undisciplined, and at times it tries too hard for laughs or shocks. But their fish-out-of-water formula is spot-on. It's easy to laugh at crudity, but it's far more fun to laugh at people who just can't take the joke.