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Every so often, a film comes along that stimulates the mind. Watching
Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, on the other hand, I could actually feel my IQ
dropping as the film went on. It was cool. For his first feature film, writer-director Mike Judge, the man who brought life to Beavis and Butt-Head on the small screen, sends his dim-witted heroes on a quest to find their stolen TV set. The film's very first scene, where the boys wake up to find the TV set gone, proves once and for all that they're not exactly rocket surgeons. Butt-Head surveys the room, noticing a broken window and a trail of muddy footprints that lead from the window right to where the TV usually sits, then out the door to the street, where a scruffy-looking pair of guys put the TV into the back of a van. Even a six-year-old could tell you what happened; the scruffy-looking guys stole the TV! Butt-Head's take on the situation: this sucks! With that harsh thought still fresh in their minds, our metal morons set out to find another TV. They look through the trash, try and steal one from their | high school, only to find themselves at a fleabag motel, watching a test
pattern with Muddy Grimes (voiced by Bruce Willis), a two-bit drunk who mistakes
Beavis and Butt-Head for two hitmen he hired to kill his wife. Muddy's offer is pretty straightforward: he'll pay the two of them $10,000 if they go to Las Vegas and do his wife. Naturally, the boys get the wrong idea (go figure!) and they jump at the chance. After they get to Las Vegas, though, Beavis and Butt-Head are outsmarted by Muddy's wife, Dallas (Demi Moore). She promises them that if they get on a bus to Washington, she'll meet them there and ... well, you know. What the boys don't realize is that while they were fighting over who would get to sleep with her first, she hid a container of highly-toxic nerve gas inside Beavis'shorts. Moments after the bus pulls away, the division of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms closes in on Dallas. Once the agent in charge, Fleming (Robert Stack), finds out that Beavis and Butt-Head were involved, he immediately brands them "the most dangerous men in America," and orders the first in a long series of painful cavity searches in an attempt to get the container back. |
With the feds hot on their trails, Beavis and Butt-Head accidentally
begin to live up to their reputation. When the boys sneak into the control room
at Hoover Dam and cause a flood while trying to tune in MTV on the monitors,
Fleming automatically assumes that they're trying to put some distance between
themselves and the law. Along the way to Washington, Beavis and Butt-Head run into their long-suffering neighbor, Mr. Anderson, a busload of nuns and a former Motley Crue roadie (Dave Letterman, using the alias "Earl Hofert") who bears a striking resemblance to both boys. He obviously fathered the two of them, since none of them can spot the resemblance. Will Washington be destroyed by a biological virus? Where does Mr. Anderson figure into all this? Will Beavis and Butt-Head go to jail, or will they get off? (Uh huh-huh. I said "get off.") You'll have to buy a ticket to find out. Like most movies adapted from a five-minute sketch, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America drags a bit in places. The animation, while impressive in spots, doesn't really improve a whole lot on the TV series. But none of that really matters. The screenplay, co-written by Judge and Joe Stillman, maintains the same comic energy that made the series a classic. In other words, Judge and Stillman deliver big laughs, but with all the subtlety of Keith Moon. In the end, it doesn't really matter what Beavis and Butt-Head are doing. As long as they're on screen, you can't take your eyes off them. |