#robertstack

Beavis and Butt-Head Do America follows two stupid teenagers - we’re talking truly, deeply idiotic - but the movie itself is smart. It's surprisingly sophisticated in its satire and even if you’ve never seen the show, it’s very funny.

Beavis and Butt-head (voiced by series creator and film director/writer Mike Judge) are TV-loving, unsophisticated, barely literate, juvenile delinquents, with no adult supervision. When they wake up to discover their prized television stolen, they search for a new one, inadvertently getting sucked into a nationwide search that involves a biological weapon, assassinations, government agents, cavity searches, misunderstandings, and lewd humor.

Forgive me if I'm reiterating what everyone already knows about these characters, but I’ve never seen a single episode of Beavis and Butt-Head. What surprised me most was the spot-on satire throughout. These teenagers are portrayed as total idiots but it's done accurately. Beavis and Butt-Head perfectly embody everything frustrating about 13- to 19-year-olds. They are too narrow-minded to appreciate the world around them and dismissive of important things they don’t deem cool. Often destructive (even accidentally so), they believe themselves the center of the universe. These two couldn't pronounce "assassin" without laughing if their lives depended on it.

Even the way the animation and character designs reinforce this idea. Our protagonists are drawn crudely while everyone else being illustrated in a fairly realistic manner. It emphasizes how underdeveloped these two tv lovers are. There’s a lot of amusing subtlety in the details.

The irony is that Beavis and Butt-Head are our heroes. Most of the time they get out of situations ok - if only because they’re too dimwitted to realize what’s happening. Hilariously, they don’t ever get to suffer the consequences of their actions. That's what everyone else is for. Like any good show turned into a movie the plot is bigger, it delivers sights you won’t normally see on TV and gives you something new. You'll find many memorable and iconic moments that I would say you'll love to quote, but how funny they would be out of context is hard to judge. Even seeing a clip of one of the film’s best moments, a hallucination set to  White Zombie's Ratfinks, Suicide Tanks And Cannibal Girls, pales in comparison to how funny it is when it comes up naturally in the story. There's a lot of re-watch value here.

If you didn’t grow up with MTV and you’ve always wondered what Beavis and Butt-Head was about, check out their movie. If you previously dismissed it as cheap trash for dumb teenagers, it isn’t. This is the kind of movie I’m looking forward to watching again. Alone, and with different crowds to discuss and dissect all of the little elements. Also just to hear how people will react to the duo. Will they find the teens be called annoying, or simply hilarious? I had a good feeling about Beavis and Butt-Head from the start and I certainly wasn't disappointed. (Full-screen version on VHS, October 15, 2015)