Its quite hard to impress on someone who wasnt alive when ‘Beavis and Butthead’ were a serious ‘thing’ just how all encompassing that show was to live through, indeed if you were aged between 7 and 25 during that time, barely a day would go by without hearing at least one half hearted attempt at ‘the laugh’ or a faltering ‘Cornholio’ impression. And, as expected whenever kids latch on to something as a craze or vocal stim, theres an immediate backlash, with parents and pressure groups citing the show as ‘the end of decency and culture as we know it’. If you believe the current ‘6-7’ craze is a sign of the end times, you have to remind yourself that every generation has at least one fad that would make the average Gen Alpha recoil in their seat with cringe.

Anyway; I digress, Beavis and Butthead were a cultural force in the early 90s and by 1995 the show had hit such a fever pitch, the Mike Judge and the team were given the opportunity to bring the wayward teens to the big screen, with an inflated budget and less regulations than TV had. And…well, if you were worried they’d screw the pooch on this one, your in safe hands.

The plot is, in essence, just a bigger budgeted(?) slightly bigger narrative than the original 15 minute shorts. Some bunghole has stolen Beavis and Buttheads TV, and they decide to try and track the fartknockers down. In doing so however (and breaking several TVs in the process) they end up in the motel room of ‘Muddy’ a criminal who’s been double crossed by his partner ‘Dallas’ Muddys been drinking and mistakes the pair for some hitmen he’d arranged to meet to ‘take out’ Dallas. And Beavis and Butthead are too dumb to realise that they arnt the hitmen Muddys looking for, instead; they misunderstand the situation and assume that Muddy wants them to ‘Do’ his wife for 10 grand. So they agree immediately and head to Vegas to find Dallas.

On finding Dallas however, she quickly realises that these boys have NO idea whats going on, and using her ‘womanly wiles’ convinces the boys to go to Washington, where she’ll go ‘all the way’ with them AND offer them 20 grand if they’ll ‘do’ Muddy…something the boys are less enthusiastic about…The reality is, Dallas has hidden a high tech device in Beavis’s shorts, and is using them essentially as mules to get the device to Washington without raising suspicion. Little does everyone know, the ATF are hot on the case, tracking the boys across America in an attempt to reclaim the device.

The boys have NO idea any of this is going on, and are literally only doing this to score and get 20 grand…hilarity ensues.

I think, if you were only going to show one piece of ‘Beavis and Butthead’ related media to someone to give them an idea of how it worked and why it was so successful. This would probably be it for me. it distills pretty much everything I love about Beavis and Butthead into an hour and 15 minute non stop dumber than dumb freakout, but it does so in a polished way that the TV shows budget just couldnt accomodate.

The animation is smooth, crisp and the swap to film really excentuates the finer details. The TV show was notorious for reusing animation from as far back as the pilot and first series (when things were INFINITELY rougher) and its nice here to just see consistant animation style without the need to recycle.

The scripts a riot, barely 2 minutes goes by without a chuckle or just…full blown belly laugh from me, the pacings zippy, the act structuring meanders, but that plays into the humour really nicely. the direction feels bigger budgeted than the TV series and while I am a bit sad that the ‘Music Video’ segements couldnt be better integrated. The fact they managed to pull artists ranging from Isaac Hayes, to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers to White Zombie more than makes up for the loss.

The cast is frankly star studded, with Demi Moore and Bruce Willis absolutely nailing the brief as Muddy and Dallas. Though, I do feel seeing all these more complex characters here feels a bit unsettling to the universe already built. The whole point of Beavis and Butthead was that these were two small town dumb teens who couldnt think beyond there city, treating the handful of grownups and kids that they knew (who were equally fairly one dimensional) as if they were idols. Introducing richer deeper characters in some regards feels a bit weird. But it acclimatizes pretty well ultimately.

Beavis and Butthead do America is one of those movies that I can just throw on at a moments notice, its full of lovely small gags, and the relentless repetative humour has me a captive audience for the full runtime. Up until the MTV reboot in the 2010s, this was probably the best the series looked, its stupid, its daft, its silly, its a junk food movie…but a bloody satisfying one!

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/beavis-and-butt-head-do-america/1/