2) Team America: World Police
Even when South Park is at its most intelligently satirical, it never loses that deep-seated, mildly disturbing tendency towards gross out humour on an epic scale. Team America: World Police is chock full of the stuff, knowingly rubbing itself against pretty much any prejudice it could find – as well as featuring more vomit than any puppet-based film made before or since. It’s not a movie to watch with the parents, and as if Matt Stone and Trey Parker didn’t need to emphasize it more, they then went and added one of the most awkward sex scenes in the history of cinema.
Up to this point in the film the clunky puppetry (A tribute to Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet et al) has been a source of light amusement, as the characters walked around in a sort of mid-squat pose and the “fighting” amounts to the puppets involved being repeatedly bumped against one another, but Stone and Parker were only ever going to take it one place.
The result is a minute and a half of excruciating, clunky and absolutely hilarious bonking poses, complete with lusty close ups of the puppets’ frozen, plastic faces of wide-eyed ecstasy. It’s classic line-crossing from Stone and Parker – no strangers to the ridiculous and the gaudy – pulling out all the stops to wring every last gasp out of an audience who’ve already been assailed by a perfect storm of crude and utterly tasteless comedy. It’s a scene that takes Team America: World Police to all new levels of self-effacing depravity, somehow managing to make puppetry even less sexy than it was before.
– Dominic Mill