review for Cannibal! The Musical on AllMovie

Whatever words you would use to describe a Trey Parker movie, "boring" should not be one of them. But that's the most apt description of Cannibal! The Musical, the would-be audacious feature debut from the South Park co-creator. The gross-out moments are there, but the plodding wilderness episodes that connect them are real momentum killers, especially for the film's primary audience: South Park fans who want to go back and see how it all began. An occasional axe in the face or joke about eating human butt should keep them going, but there's not enough of a mischievous undercurrent for it to become a fully realized satire. It's no surprise that the gore-loving Troma Entertainment gave Parker a break when all other studios passed, since the opening orgy of torn flesh and spurting blood is right up their alley. However, after this promising if slightly childish start, Parker commits a sin that's never again been a problem in his career -- he underplays the material. As Alfred Packer (using the ethnically contradictory pseudonym Juan Schwartz), Parker gets his own character's tone right -- he's the naïve innocent walking through an outlandish world, a role he embraces in Orgazmo and abandons (to his detriment) in BASEketball. But his parody of the frontier musical plays surprisingly close to the vest, and the result is that the outside world isn't grotesque enough. The songs -- too obvious by half -- are one of several proofs that Parker's satirical tools are not yet fully sharpened. Then again, if "Blame Canada!" is the standard to be reckoned with, a person has to just step back and allow a young comic to cut his teeth -- as it were.