New Movie Reviews For You!

Had a wonderful Saturday in the city. And from it, I've got two new movie reviews for you.

First up, Pixar whore that I am, I just had to run out and Wall-E. You'll find the review for that over at the main site.

Next up, I had to pick up a certain straight-to-DVD movies. For the OVA's, I tend not to do up a fancy review at the main page. I just review them here. So, without further ado, here's my review for the second Futurama OVA:

Futurama: The Beast With a Billion Backs

Directed by Peter Avanzio

Starring the voices of Billy West, Katey Segal, John diMaggio, Tress MacNeille, Maurice la Marche, Phil laMar, Lauren Tom, David Herman, and special guest voices David Cross, Brittany Murphy, Stephen Hawking, and Dan Castellenta.

Backstory: I loved Futurama back in the day! I loved it when they announced a series of OVA movies. the first one, Bender's Big Score, was a fantastic return to form. How well would the second one fare?

Plot: It's one month since the end of Bender's Big Score, and Earth is still wondering what to do about the crack in the fabric of the universe that's opened up in the heavens. It's not too long before the brave Planet Express crew is sent on an expidition to investigate. However, our hero, Fry, is feeling pretty down. He just can't come to embrace his new girlfriend and her polygamist ways. Feeling lost and alone, Fry hurls himself into the crack, where he meets the planet-sized entity Yivo. Before long, Fry returns with Yivo's tentacles of love and spreads the word. Is Yivo really nothing but an entity of love, or are his machinations much more sinister? In various sub-plots, Bender joins the League of Robots, Kif and Amy finally get married, and the Professor and his arch-rival Wormstrum finally reach an understanding.

What I Liked: Bender's son. Stephen Hawking's laser vision. "Let's settle this like men of science!" A truly brilliant sci-fi re-interpretation of the Rapture.

What I Didn't Like: Sadly, it was a little lighter on laughs than Bender's Big Score.

Final Assessment: Bender's Big Score felt like a (straight-to-video at least) movie. This one does feel like three episodes of the show strung together.

3 Nibs

DVD Bonus Material: On this here DVD set, you also get:

• Running commentary with crew and voice cast
• Futurama: The Lost Adventure. The cut scenes for the Futurama video game, edited together and presented as a "lost episode." This also has a running commentary with the crew and voice cast.
• The animatic for the first 1/3 of the film
• Deleted scenes that never made it past the storyboard stage
• David Cross, the voice of Yivo, explaining what his character's all about
• the voice cast messing around in the recording studio
• 3-D models of the spaceships
• A Brief History of Deathball
• The trailer for the third OVA, Bender's Game, due out this fall