Do you think belching is funny? What about watching people drink so much that they do horribly embarrassing things that they may not want to remember the next day? Do you appreciate a good male-prostitute gag? Does it take a lot to offend you? Do you love Jürgen Prochnow and think Das Boot jokes are das gute?
If you can answer “yes” to at least two of the above questions, do I ever have a movie for you. From the comedy team Broken Lizard (Super Troopers) comes Beerfest, a movie so vulgar, so infantile, and so slyly clever, it’s hilarious.
When the Wolfhouse-clan paterfamilias (Donald Sutherland) dies, his two great-grandkids (Erik Stolhanske and Paul Soter) are charged with taking his cremains back to the old country — Germany — for enshrinement with other ancestors. While there, they discover a secret Olympics-style games based around beer-guzzling. They decide to recruit an American team, return the following year to compete, and honor their great-grandfather’s name.
Some of the best bits in the movie are during the competition. Among the events are the volume chug, monkey chug, the long pour, trick quarters, bat spin, and beer pong. Participating nationalities are rife with stereotype: The German accents are all either like Toht from Raiders of the Lost Ark or Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the Brit-speak is maximum cockney. (They boast that Beerfest is for “tossers and shape-shaggers.”)
If you can stomach Beerfest, you should.
Now playing, multiple locations
