Beautiful house, my love! follows Trey Parker and Matt Stone as they renovate a run-down, inauthentic 1970s Mexican restaurant. Their labor of love becomes a bottomless pit as they chase the landmark’s former glory.

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Perhaps it’s because most of us come from somewhere else that Americans love recreations of foreign places – William Randolph Hearst’s mock European castle in San Simeon, California; Paris Las Vegas, with its half-sized Eiffel Tower and miniature Louvre; or the mock Alpine village found in Helen, Georgia, of all places. Such wildly ambitious recreations create a dizzying atmosphere that Umberto Eco called “hyperreality,” and fill almost everyone with childlike joy.

These include Trey Parker and Matt Stone from South Park And The Book of Mormon fame. Though notorious for their cynical humor, both harbor a deep affection for one of the places they idolized as children: Casa Bonita, a 50,000-square-foot attraction in a Lakewood, Colorado, mall that’s been dubbed the Disneyland of Mexican restaurants. It’s an Anglo-Saxon businessman’s fantastical version of an ancient Mexican village, adorned with Wild West bandits, volcanoes, cliff divers and even a gorilla running through stalactite-studded caves.

More than half a century after it opened in 1974 – complete with a TV advert starring Ricardo Montalban! – this once spectacular crowd-puller had fallen on such desperate times that it was doomed to close. Then it was bought out of bankruptcy “as is”. by Stone and Parker, who vowed to save Colorado’s beloved landmark and restore it to its former glory.

Their struggle is the subject of the entertaining new documentary Beautiful house, my love! Directed by Arthur Bradford and produced by MTV Documentary Films, the film is a delight, featuring great archive footage, excerpts from South Park and Elvis’ film Fun in Acapulcoas well as countless scenes in which Parker and Stone are amused and horrified as they learn the latest reason why their heart’s desire is becoming a bottomless pit.

After a brisk short story about the Casa Bonita, with its Pepto-Bismol-pink facade and blue fountain in front of it, the film returns to the present to show what it takes to rebuild a mecca whose true meaning lies in the feelings it once evoked. Since the original Casa Bonita was notorious for its terrible food, James Beard Award-nominated chef Dana Rodriguez is hired to take Parker to Oaxaca to soak up the atmosphere and find inspiration.

But the wonderful inspiration meets the not so wonderful reality. It turns out that their new property is a run-down death trap where everything – electricity, plumbing, air conditioning – needs to be replaced. A renovation originally estimated at $6 million is suddenly estimated to cost over $20 million.

Now, as Beautiful house, my love! is not only a tale of the high price of nostalgia, but also a glimpse into one of pop culture’s most iconic creative teams. It doesn’t take long to see the differences between the two longtime friends – Parker is clearly the dreamy, creative one; Stone is the wise whetstone on which he sharpens his ideas. What might surprise you is the secret sentimentality of guys whose comedy prides itself so much on finding nothing sacred. Parker, in particular, betrays a certain sweetness in his romantic attachment to the innocent pleasures of childhood. He’s also a perfectionist. We see his artistic process, how he attends to and tweaks every creative detail of the project.

As their crew desperately tries to get everything perfect for opening day—and spends even more millions in the process—it becomes clear that Parker and Stone are chasing a ghost, or perhaps a paradox. The original Casa Bonita was a faux-1970s version of 19th-century Mexico, but to recapture its magic, this new version can’t be the same Casa Bonita Parker remembers so fondly. Just as the Indiana Jones films had to resort to A-list talent to imitate cheap, old movie serials, their restaurant must live up to today’s expectations—tastier food, better entertainment—or patrons won’t find it as exciting as the original. To convey the same feeling, it has to be different.

When Casa Bonita finally reopens—and there’s a happy ending—Parker and Stone have done something that couldn’t be more American: They’ve spent a fortune building a copy of a Mexican restaurant that’s even better than the original.