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Rating: Beavis and Butt-head. I think if you don’t know these two characters, you are either too young or lying. Born on MTV from the mind of Mike Judge, also known as the creator of "Silicon Valley" and occasionally an actor (he appeared in Rodriguez's "Spy Kids 2"), Beavis and Butt-head are involved in very common situations, where they represent the prototype of teenagers who find entertainment in doing anything considered forbidden by adults. Every teenager of their age finds rebellion in doing these actions, from smoking to drinking alcohol to having sex. Even the dialogues between the two are sometimes so disjointed, and almost never lead anywhere, that they intensify the bizarre and absurd atmosphere within the cartoon. How many of us felt rebellious at their age thinking the same things these two boys dream of having daily?
In 1996 their first and only film was released, titled "Beavis and Butt-head Do America." Needless to say, it made good money, especially because the series experienced its peak period of mediation at the highest levels during those years. The plot starts with the two boys realizing one day (somehow) that someone has stolen their TV. From here begins a series of hilarious events, where due to a misunderstanding, they are mistaken for two dangerous thugs by a criminal, who sends them on a mission to Las Vegas to "whack" his charming wife, in exchange they will be promised a wad of cash to buy back their TV.
Let’s make it clear: the film is fantastic. Sure, for those unfamiliar with the characters, it will be more challenging to immediately dive into their dimension, but it’s also true that we’re not facing an operation that distorts the essence of the animated series. The improper language remains, and there are so many ambiguous jokes that it’s impossible to count them. Beavis and Butt-head are immediately presented to us as two literally idiotic kids, but in their not feeling any kind of remorse for doing bad actions, you end up becoming attached to them. Think about their love for their television, which for them is a sort of microcosm where they can feel accepted by something, and here there’s a splendid and cruel critique of a generation of teenagers emptied of values, somewhat ominous as a premonition of the advent of the Internet in the coming century. No moralizing, a raw insight though "lightened" by the bizarre profanity of the two boys. Later on, the film takes another turn, that of noir and cop story, among criminals, cops, and the American military commando. Besides the noir theme, there are truly surreal sequences in Terry Gilliam’s style, referencing the Peyote trip in the desert, where everything transforms into a hallucinatory music video, filled with monstrous music instruments and orgies of demons in the background. The settings between deserts, prairies, and highways somehow pay homage to a Coen Brothers-esque road movie (not coincidentally, the beautiful "Fargo" would come out the same year), with characters laced with irony doing everything to achieve their goal, which is to "whack" the criminal’s wife as agreed, and it’s splendid how the two boys confuse the term "kill" with "screw," unaware of the gravity of the situation behind it when a chip containing a dangerous biological weapon gets involved, making them unknowingly become the two most dangerous criminals sought in America, possibly the world. Their goal is to find the wife to fulfill their dream of the "first screw of their life"; they don’t care about anything else, and they will risk their lives for this chance until the end.
It goes without saying that Beavis and Butt-head cause damage wherever they lay their hands, and there are plenty of hilarious sequences, such as the one with the dam, or the appearance of Cornohlio, Beavis’s alter ego and split personality whenever he takes hyper-stimulating meds due to his hyperactivity. The characters add this element of fun to the film, all in the realm of the absurd: we have the hippie pacifist teacher who sings the hilarious "Lesbian Seagull" in class as if it were a Bob Dylan song, the neighbor who represents a proud ex-marine who feels American, yet when the kids are involved, he always ends up paying because of them. We have the police officer responsible for rectal checks on all investigated individuals, whose silent face reveals her sadistic hunger in her work. Finally, we have the two criminals, he originally voiced by Bruce Willis, she by Demi Moore, who were already partners in real life at the time. Then there’s the marvelous character of the old lady, leading to a hilarious exchange of unintentional ambiguous jokes with Beavis, who as usual doesn’t understand a thing and does things his own way. It’s wonderful how the interactions among characters are born in a context that doesn’t go too over-the-top in the absurdity of situations, making them much more realistic than the film itself.
The film comes with an excellent soundtrack, from the opening titles parodying "Starsky & Hutch," to the Las Vegas sequence with Red Hot Chili Peppers’ "Love Rollercoaster" playing in the background, along with Rancid, Ozzy Osbourne, AC/DC, and Rob Zombie. Exactly the kind of music we expect to pop out of Beavis and Butt-head’s TV. Noteworthy are the Italian voice actors for the two protagonists, if in the series they were voiced by Faso and Elio of Elio e le Storie Tese (in the first TV episodes even by Luigi Rosa and Paolo Rossi), here instead the voices are entrusted to Alessio Cigliano and Neri Marcoré, whom I overall appreciated very much, and the difference is noticeable when dealing with professional voice actors (Cigliano is especially known for the animated series Kenshiro, where he voices Ken himself).
In conclusion, "Beavis and Butt-head Do America" is a small animated cult of the nineties, not a masterpiece, but it doesn’t care about being one, and neither do we. The characters work, the two protagonists elicit tons of laughter, and there’s a mountain of ingenious sequences one after another. One of those films that, unfortunately, has somewhat disappeared in recent years; the physical copy is practically hard to find, hoping someone might redistribute it on the market and restore the value it deserves.
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