Beerfest

1 of 1

Agreeably juvenile

Comedy group Broken Lizard - the team behind lowbrow fratboy comedies 'Super Troopers' (2001) and 'Club Dread' (2004) - return with 'Beerfest', a film that is destined to become a cult classic wherever beer is consumed. A self-contained unit, the film was jointly written by the five members of Broken Lizard - Jay Chandrasekar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter and Eric Stolhanske - who also star in the film and Chandrasekar directs.

There's nothing complicated about the plot which involves two brothers from Colorado, Jan (Soter) and Todd (Stolhanske) Wolfhaus, taking the ashes of their grandfather back to Germany during Oktoberfest. While there, they discover Beerfest, the secret Olympics of beer games, where international teams compete against each other in a series of drink-offs. Jan and Todd get soundly trashed and humiliated by the spiteful German team, led by their great-uncle Baron Wolfgang Von Wolfhausen (Prochnow)

Profoundly humiliated, the boys slink back home to America with a new aim in life: to beat the Germans at their own game. To that end, they recruit Barry Badrinath (Chandrasekhar), a great beer gamesman who's fallen on hard times; nerdy Jewish scientist Charlie Finklestein (Lemme) and one-man chugging machine Landfill (Heffernan).

There's some fuss about Jan and Todd's great-grandmother having a dubious past and a stolen beer recipe but make no mistake, the whole raison d'être of 'Beerfest' is (mainly) good-humoured, stupid, drunk comedy. There's plenty of belching and burping, cameos from Donald Sutherland and Willie Nelson, lots of good-looking women whose clothes suddenly fall from their generous bosoms, a neat nod to 'Das Boot' star Jürgen Prochnow and as little character development as necessary. While 'Beerfest' does overstay its welcome and feels somewhat stretched over the 110-minute running time, Broken Lizard's dumb, well-staged and frequently random silliness is agreeably juvenile.

Caroline Hennessy