TV review: sniggering and single-entendres — Beavis and Butt-Head are stuck in late puberty
Beavis and Butt-Head do the Universe: it's terrible but it caught me by surprise a few times and I laughed out loud
You should never go back.
I liked when it arrived on MTV in the mid-1990s. They captured the inner moron that every man carries around in his head.
We all have one, it’s just a matter of how well you disguise it. didn’t even try — it was two characters pared down to their male moron, sniggering at their single entendres and trying to score with chicks. (Their words, not mine.)
They were bite-sized episodes with a sometimes clever swipe at customer-driven America. (Check out one called 'Customers Suck', fart-knocker.)
Never mind that they would have grown up and voted for Donald Trump, we could see that they had been abandoned by their parents and the state. So we liked Beavis and Butt-Head. Well, men did, I’m not sure about women — I’ve never discussed the show with a woman for moron disguising reasons.
Now they’re back in movie form. is available on Paramount+, the latest streaming service to arrive here.
So is it worth the subscription?
Ah, no.
I’m not even sure why I thought it would be a good use of 90 minutes of my time. Watch two five-minute episodes of the original series, back-to-back, and your mind will glass over with the repetition.
But then opened at Number 1 in the US movie charts when it was released in 1996, going on to make $63 million. So it was like they couldn’t resist going again.
The premise for the latest show is slick enough . It starts in 1998 when a nice judge spares them a jail sentence and sends them to NASA space camp instead. Stuff happens, they get sucked into a black hole and travel forward in time to 2022. They come face-to-face with modern-day woke culture.
That seems promising, but they couldn’t deliver. It had some funny bits — particularly when they stumbled into a gender politics lecture, learned they had white privilege and thought this was the best news they ever heard in their lives.
There are a few set-pieces for the fans: Beavis takes pills and does his Cornholio impression, Butt- H ead says 'fart-knocker' a few times.
It caught me by surprise a few times and I laughed out loud, like when Beavis made a funny noise after giving a heart-felt speech to reporters before getting on the space shuttle.
But mainly it’s terrible. The plot feels like it was written in 10 minutes — by Butt-Head.
There are a funny few swipes at woke culture, particularly the man-splaining feminist with a man-bun, but they fizzle out quickly and we’re back to the two boys repeating "you said 'hard'"
I’m not sure this movie could ever work. Beavis and Butt-Head can’t break character. They can’t learn or ‘go on a journey’, because they’re forever stuck in late puberty. So the movie is just 90 minutes of us going around in horny teenage boy circles.
You should never go back.
