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I am – Hercules!!

Futurama: The Beast With A Billion Backs, starring the voice of David Cross, finally hits DVD shelves. If you missed our June 9 review from “Orwellseyes,” here it is again:

The story is pretty standard for Futurama. A crack in the universe, leading the people of earth to panic, as usual. The Planet Express crew ends up checking this fissure in space-time out, as usual. Bender ends up damaged and gets some cheering up from his hero, the robot soap star Calculon. Amy and Kiff get alien-married. It involves a swamp and mud and Kiff's weird-ass alien life cycle. The professor and his rival Dr. Wernstrum have their usual arguments. Fry has woman woes, his girlfriend (voiced by Brittany Murphy) has four other boyfriends. He tries to make it work by moving in, with all of them. It's too much for him and he ends up leaving her. He mopes around for a bit and ends up stowing away on a military ship captained by Zap Brannigan bound for the rip in reality. They're going to attack it. Fry throws himself into the rift and ends up meeting Tobias Funke. Well, actually it's a huge mass of tentacles, named YIVO, voiced by David Cross, but the way he plays it kept reminding me of his "Arrested Development" character. Yivo enters our universe and covers earth in purple tentacles. Then Fry reappears, with a tentacle in his neck, preaching a gospel of love...love for YIVO. The whole world gets taken over, save for Leela who eventually exposes YIVO. See, those tentacles are actually, "Genticals". Yep, Yivo is mating with the whole darn universe Might sound like the end of the story but this is about the half-way point actually. The whole universe starts dating YIVO. In a really funny sequence pretty much every character to ever appear in Futurama is seen going to dinner, talking with and kissing one of the purple tentacles of YIVO. Meanwhile, the robots have their own little storyline. Calculon inducts Bender into the "League of Robots" a secret society of robots who generally sit around, bitch about humans and drink. Perfect for Bender. This plot is basically there to give the robots, who don't get tentacle lovin', something to do. There are some clever moments here. Calculon and Bender become mortal foes over the tiniest possible slights and end up battled with "Planetary Annihilators" which are some of the funniest weapons I've seen on Futurama. The movie has some serious flaws. The plot is wonky, even for Futurama. This is a show where a lead once drank the emperor of a planet, silliness is part and parcel. But the the final act, which involves Robot Hell, Robot Pirates and Heaven is just nonsense. Much like the first Futurama flick "Bender's Big Score" the creators dump alot of visual energy into the last third of the film and bypass characters and even their own crazy Futurama logic. Another issue I had was how Fry and Leela have not even a second of chemistry. It's one of the long running plots of the series and here, nothing. A number of the jokes just fall flat and die, everything on Kiff's home world is just bland and dull, but thankfully there are no musical numbers, something that nearly drove me mad in "Bender's Big Score". The Fry as tentacle pope and "heaven" gags try to take the piss out of religion a bit but don't have much follow-through. Zap Brannigan continues to make me miss Phil Hartman all these years later. To think how funny that character could have been. You can almost see where they're going to slice this into individual episodes, which makes some of the pacing tor wards the middle a little awkward, but over all it flows nicely. It's definitely not for people who aren't already big fans of the series. There's no real catch-up for the non-fan. I'd say it's worth renting, though I wouldn't shell our lucre to buy it. One viewing is more than enough.

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