Beerfest
When Liz and I first found out that the feature film Beerfest not only existed, but was coming soon to a theater near us, needless to say, we made immediate plans to see it. But if there’s one thing we love more than drinking, it’s laziness, and our plans to see the film on opening night soon turned into vague intentions to see it before it left the theaters, which eventually turned into complete ambivalence. But then one day I happened to look at the new releases on Netflix, and there it was, in all its low-rated glory.
Mere days later, we got properly intoxicated and popped in the DVD, which is decorated with not only beer, but boobs as well. We immediately knew just what kind of a classy time we were in for. The film began, and before we knew it we were on the beer-soaked ride of our lives!
The film is yet another irreverent romp from those wild and crazy rebels, comedy troupe Broken Lizard. They made that movie about cops that wasn’t so bad, and then that movie about the beach that was really shitty. Anyway, the two central characters, Jan and Todd Wolfhouse (played by Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske, respectively), are fairly nondescript but drive the plot, which has to do with inheritances and stuff. Their grandmother is played by Cloris Leachman, and she’s a hooker with a heart of gold who likes jerking off sausages. It’s really depressing seeing Cloris reduced to this, but at least she does a good job, which is more than I can say for Mo’Nique. She stinks up the screen something awful as a villainess in cahoots with the Germans who fight the Wolfhouse brothers for control of something or other.
So it’s decided that the brothers have to take down the evil Germans in a top-secret drinking game tournament in Munich. In standard shitty movie format, they assemble a ragtag team of misfits and embark upon a series of montages. Their teammates include a ridiculously stereotypical Jewish guy, Steve ‘Fink’ Finklestein (Steve Lemme), who is supposed to be a legitimate scientist but spends the majority of his screentime jerking off frogs and having sex with Mo’Nique. Then there’s the big lug who can drink a lot of beer, and of course the gay male prostitute, played by director and co-writer Jay Chandrasekhar. None of these characters are especially compelling, but who really cares? It’s the beer we came for, and this movie does not let us forget it. Beer is the motivation for every plot point in this film, and the resolution to every conflict. The problem, I suppose, is that even though beer is obviously awesome, there are only so many jokes you can make about drinking massive quantities of beer, and it gets slightly old. In addition, the filmmakers seem to have been so busy making jokes about how awesome beer is that they forgot to include any sex! Even during the gratuitous boob-flashing scenes, which appear to have been inserted into the DVD version so it could be marketed as unrated, nothing even remotely sexual occurs! Two lovely ladies even get drenched in beer and thrown into the arms of our heroes, but in the next shot they’re nowhere to be found!
Regardless, all was forgiven once we got to the end of the film, which included a cliff-hanger introducing the content of the film’s sequel…that’s right, Potfest, the greatest film ever made (we can only assume)! It would seem one Willie Nelson requires assistance for a pot-smoking contest, and our not-so-reluctant heroes are just the men for the job! So of course Liz and I have made a pledge to be there on opening day, but then again, that’s what we said when we heard about Beerfest. God, we’re lazy.
