Beavis et Butt-Head se font l'Amérique

Animated MTV characters Beavis and Butt-Head made their feature film debut with this very funny movie that actually does a good job of sustaining itself for 81 minutes, with a pretty good story and plenty of the kind of humour that us B & B fans love so much. It's gleefully lowbrow stuff, and that's just the way we like it.

Our favourite antisocial horn dog teenagers wake to discover that the most important item in their lives, their TV set, has been stolen, and their search leads them to a shady character named Muddy (voiced by Bruce Willis). Muddy offers them $10,000 to do his wife Dallas (voice of Demi Moore), and B & B readily accept after misinterpreting the word "do". They become embroiled in an elaborate plot to steal a powerful biological weapon, all while following the quintessential B & B agenda: trying to score!

B & B's assorted adventures include making life miserable for cranky old neighbor Tom Anderson, causing havoc at places such as the Hoover Dam, the appearance of the legendary Cornholio (who, of course, just needs TP for his bunghole), encountering two very familiar looking former Motley Crue roadies, hallucinating in the desert, and having some eventful plane and bus rides. (It's just so priceless that B & B, upon seeing that they'll be on a bus full of nuns, can't see past the fact that their fellow passengers are chicks.) The colourful cast of characters also includes Agent Flemming (in an inspired bit of casting, Robert Stack voices this part), an ATF agent obsessed with cavity searches. Cloris Leachman plays the aged "slut" on the plane & bus, and Eric Bogosian, Richard Linklater, and David Letterman (billing himself as Earl Hofert) round out the various pop culture figures supplying voices.

And everything is set to a kick ass soundtrack that begins with a "Shaft" style number co-written by Isaac Hayes and B & B creator Mike Judge. Other artists heard include the Red Hot Chili Peppers, White Zombie (Rob Zombie also supplies the artwork for the hallucination sequence), AC/DC, Rancid, LL Cool J, Ozzy Osbourne, and Butthole Surfers.

If you're a fan of the TV series, you're sure to enjoy "Beavis & Butt-Head Do America". It's extremely agreeable from start to finish, and doesn't overstay its welcome. It delivers more laughs than a lot of live-action comedies.

Eight out of 10.

Beavis & Butt-Head Do America is a good movie with a pretty well written storyline and a terrific voice cast. It's nothing outstanding, but it's simply a fun and enjoyable ninety minutes of animated adult comedy. I'm not a huge fan of the Beavis & Butt-Head television series, I like it but don't love it and that's the same way I felt about this, I don't have any care or sympathy for these characters, but seeing them behave like huge idiots in this movie, which is basically just a long episode of the series, was certainly a good time. Die hard fans of the television series will certainly love it, as for people who have never seen a single episode, it is still worth the watch if you ever see it on television and have some time to kill.

After their TV is stolen, Beavis & Butt-Head travel across America in search of it.

"Beavis and Butthead Do America" is filled with vulgar humour, sadistic or otherwise bizarre characters and a convoluted plot insane enough to make no sense. These are some of the movie's finer qualities. If you didn't like the main duo to begin with then this will do nothing to convince you otherwise. But why should it?

Mike Judge has managed to fill out the 75 or so minutes well without making it drag, and he's done it with style. Since he cannot change the simplistic, constantly sniggering leads he has done the most logical thing he could by surrounding them with a plethora of multi-faceted characters tied together with a conspiracy plot that takes them into other locations where their simple-but-effective double-entendre humour can flourish. Previous characters make a return and are given some development where relevant to the plot.

It all starts inauspiciously enough - the hard rock obsessed teenagers awake one day, still on their couch, to find their beloved television is missing. Not smart enough to put the pieces of the puzzle together to catch the thieves in the act, they try and steal one from their school. Wandering around town ever more desperate, they somehow manage to usurp the television thieves, but not in the way you might expect. This lands them right in the thick of it, and the unassuming pair make their way through. Hilarity ensues on a regular basis.

In my opinion as a would-be critic, we need more films like these. Certainly there are plenty of gross-out movies, some of them also animated (as a side note the animation here is a nice balance between the original show and something more polished) but there are few that can take simple toilet humour and dress it up so well, making it more than just a guilty pleasure to enjoy after a few beers and/or a joint. This is right up there with the finer moments of South Park for such an achievement, and can easily be considered Beavis and Butt-Head's crowning moment of funny and/or awesome.

Overall this is a fun, feelgood comedy which doesn't require all your brainpower to enjoy to the fullest, though an extra watch or two might throw up a few sight gags or subplot references that you missed the first time around for whatever reason(!) The plot seems somehow relevant too, considering that it also deals with an issue that has been a headline grabber in post-9/11 society. But not without a couple of sniggers along the way, of course.

7 stars out of 10: very, very good.

I know a lot of you who have never seen Beavis and Butthead probably think very little of the show based on the low-brow nature of it (I was one of them), but if you give this movie a chance you'll see that it's actually as well written and at times as, dare I say, subtle as King of the Hill.

Beavis and Butthead have their TV stolen and when trying to get it back are mistaken for hit men by drunken drunk Muddy Grimes (Bruce Willis, as I was rather shocked to find out once the credits rolled), who sends them on a mission to 'do his wife' Dallas. Misinterpreting this as any horny teenagers would, B+B head to Las Vegas to carry out the terrible act. But we discover (they don't, however) that Dallas and Muddy are part of international weapons conspiracy and our two teen-aged heroes are being set-up to take the blame.

So, as they take off across the country, causing absolute mayhem wherever they go, the ATF closely follow, giving full body cavity searches to everyone and anyone they meet at the order of head honcho Agent Flemming (the late Robert Stack), who comes out with some brilliant, deadpan one-liners. The set-pieces are wonderful and the mushroom-induced dream sequence by Rob Zombie looks amazing.

Mike Judge's animation style also brilliant. Avoiding bright, primary colors used in shows such as The Simpsons, Family Guy and Futurama, he uses mainly softer colors, pencil-effect scenery and water-color backgrounds. It's a sort of calming, easy-going animation style that he's totally made his own.

You should totally check-out this movie. Don't be put off by what you may have heard or may think of Beavis and Butthead. You'll be conning yourself out of loads of laughs if you do.

And look-out for Daria Morgendorfer in the 'Lesbian Seagull' scene.

There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who find Beavis & Butt-Head hilarious and those who find them unbearable. I'm in the former category and was pleasantly surprised by how funny I still found this film. I remember when it originally came out that Beavis & Butt-Head were pretty played out by this point and a feature length theatrical film filled with big names voicing characters (Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Robert Stack, Cloris Leachman, Eric Bogosian, Richard Linklater, Greg Kinnear, David Spade, and David Letterman as a Roadie) seemed like overkill. I remember grudgingly liking the film, but rewatching after having not seen Beavis & Butt-Head in quite some time, the film felt pretty fresh and surprisingly prescient given the amount of pop culture youth take in today, along with the dumbing down society (also see Mike Judge's underrated satire "Idiocracy" for further explorations of these same themes). However, it may be that I'm now older and and am just cranky old man bemoaning "kids these days." Back in 1996, MTV was the main source of youth pop culture and Beavis & Butt-Head were a hilarious sent up of MTV's lowest common denominator fans. Today, youth consume pop culture instead through any number of social media apps and streaming apps/devices, rather than one channel and Tiger Beat magazine. The medium may have changed, but a satire of youth culture being dumbed down (to a ridiculously low level of by our two heroes) is still just as relevant today. I think it's this element of satire that many critics missed back when Beavis & Butt-Head originally aired. Beavis & Butt-Head were never presented as characters to to aspire to or intended to be seen as "cool." They were made by their creators to be held up for ridicule and to be mocked. Admittedly, many youth at the time missed the intended irony and instead enjoyed the TV series for all the wrong reasons, but that's not a reason to dismiss the characters outright. Now to this film in particular, the pair have their precious television stolen and they then set out to find a replacement, which has them mistaken for hitmen and puts them in the middle of government espionage and intrigue, of which they are completely oblivious. I found just about everything in the film hilarious and worthy of being considered satire. Everything in the film works as both as straight humor and also as social commentary. From the oblivious Tom Anderson (a likely cousin of King of the Hill's Hank Hill) to Mr. Van Driessen lovingly sung rendition of Lesbian Seagull over a montage of Beavis & Butt-Head obscenities committed across the country on their ill conceived cross country road trip to "score," to the pair meeting the Bubba US President of the 90s, Bill Clinton, is all quite funny and quite clever. Overall, if you can get past (or get into) the crass surface level humor, "Beavis & Butt-Head Do America" is heeeeee-larious.