Beerfest (2006)

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

The acting in this movie is really good.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Saw this on Comedy Central while the remote was held hostage by a young nephew. This movie is awful in nearly all aspects, but I can forgive a comedy everything from sexism/racism/nationalism/lack_of_coherent_plot/etc if it's at least funny. It just wasn't, comedy's unforgivable sin.This ranks with the worst of SNL or other frat comedies where you keep looking at the watch and wanting something to happen, like a power outage or something. I mean, give me something to work with, a witty line or funny physical gag. Just look at the quotes page here; dreary and without wit. The writers should do the world a favor and live solely on dehydrated water for a month.

"It's seven o'clock and I wanna rock Wanna get a belly full of beer..." --Elton John, Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting).They're not Monty Python… but they're on their way.Broken Lizard's BEERFEST (directed by team member, Jay Chandresakar) is a drunken, disorderly, swelling knob of a film, as quirkingly funny as it is quackingly stupid, chock full of pissing, puking, belching, swilling, swearing, skulling, vomiting and giant jugs. Of beer. Two German-blooded American brothers, Jan and Todd Wolfhouse (Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske), who run a brewery called Schnitzengiggles, travel to Germany (pronounced "Chermanny" by all the Deutschlanders in the film for maximum frat-house authenticity) to scatter the ashes of their dead grandfather during Oktoberfest, and stumble upon an underground beer Olympics called Beerfest. Sent packing by the veteran Cherman drinking team (headed by mad Teuton, Jürgen Prochnow, including fey Eric Christian Olsen and gladiator Ralf Moeller), the boys resolve to return the next year and reclaim their drunken honor. The Cherman team also accuses their grandfather of stealing an age-old super-tasty beer recipe, and their grandmother (game Cloris Leachman) of being a prostitute, all of which the boys discover to be true.Desperate now to win back everything that their ancestors sullied, Jan and Todd forge their indomitable team of beer drinkers from a group of old friends - a hot-dog-eating winner (Kevin Heffernan), a Jewish egghead (Steve Lemme) and a gay prostitute who would blow them all for a bargain price (Chandrasekhar).No one cares about the plot - it's about how to make us laugh with every tiny detail that makes BEERFEST a cult favorite: Heffernan making the ventriloquil dummy repeat Lemme's lines; the team's training methods using goat urine; the hornblower not able to blow fanfare; the fact that no matter how much everyone drinks in BEERFEST, no one seems to be drunk - except for the sleeping-with-a-fat-chick scene; the painful recount by Chandresaker of his "ping pong at Ding Dang" tragedy...The Broken Lizard team are in fine form, absolving themselves of their CLUB DREAD (2004) clunker. In a mad wink to Prochnow's primo 1981 role as a U-boat captain, the last competition against the Cherman team is to skull from a giant glass boot without spilling a drop - called "Das Boot."I'd explain the physics behind the winning tactic of twisting the boot as the bubble reaches the heel, while someone urinates on my shoe - but right now I've got a date to suck on some giant jugs. Of beer.

This is just plain and simple not a good movie, but I can't help liking it. Perhaps I'm just a sucker for that whole good guys make bad guys get their comeuppance plot, even if it's done by a bunch of B-actors and worse. Are the jokes really any good? Mostly it's just vulgarities and lame slapstick, but there's nothing wrong with that. I didn't want to make that sound negative. I even laughed at the frog scenes for some reason. The way they handled the Landfill character was pretty goddamn funny too, they occasionally tried go for a full-blown parody but then bailed out on that again. This script is really just writing whatever you feel like which, again, is not really a bad thing as long as it's funny. The only bothering parts are the first fifteen minutes (plot is set up, jokes are not funny) and that stupid last bit with Willie Nelson. Talk about not quitting while you're ahead. It's a fun movie to watch and then forget almost instantly.

I try to go into every film I see with a sense of optimism and an open minded approach but films like Beerfest make this really quite difficult. Beerfest is a cynical attempt at a film, a film that, I think, quietly acknowledges how bad it really is but through having no shame whatsoever carries on down its route. But perhaps the makers have an alibi - perhaps they were drunk when they came up with the idea because that would explain the mass inclusion of beer, women and general themes of masculinity and proving oneself through the amount of alcohol one can consume.The film isn't really about anything as much as it is a piece that promotes things like alcoholism and sexism. Beerfest exists purely within the universe of a young, ill-educated and naïve American mind who still thinks getting drunk, girls with big chests (among other things) and funny accents are hilarious – it is Kevin Smith-lite and I don't even like Kevin Smith. The film is a bad advert for American cinema and it is a bad advert for America's wholly view on the rest of the world, particularly Europeans. This is at a time, given the global climate in which we live, in which America need all the friends in the West they can get. People of a European descent are dying in far off lands because of conflicts the Americans have had a hand in kicking off, and the best we can all do is make a film that demonises and humiliates them? How unfortunate.Like I said, Beerfest isn't really about anything more than it is a proving of one's self in an environment naturally hostile through discrimination. It's here that Beerfest advances into whatever little theory it has in the first place. Various Europeans and people of other nations are located at a beer festival in Germany. Americans Jan (Soter) and Todd (Stolhanske) are completely outperformed by some Germans at a drinking contest and are then publicly humiliated by the hating crowd as their dead grandfather's ashes (Donald Sutherland, in a performance that will haunt whatever legacy he'll leave behind) spill all over them. I think it's here the film-makers are trying to get across a statement to do with how they think Europeans see Americans; as these daft and ill-minded youngsters who think they can beat anyone, on any patch and at any game.Humiliated and beaten, they are sent home to lick their wounds. But they aren't finished and propose a 'Team U.S.A.' to compete at the beer festival and win back their pride. Needless to say, the film enters underdog mode. I love the way the American kids attempt to come up with their own reasons for doing what they're doing, apart from the humiliation. It's something to do with Europe and the world's love of football (soccer) and there's a line of dialogue revolving around football and how it acts as a parallel to how Americans are excluded from competition in general, echoing their inability to compete in the drinking contest amongst the world's elite.From here, Jan and Todd recruit Phil Krundle (Heffernan) whose nickname is landfill because of his ability to consume so much food; Barry Badrinath (Chandrasekhar), a male prostitute down on his luck and Charlie Finklestein (Lemme), the stereotypical geek complete with glasses and extensive knowledge in science. Finklestein also adopts the role of the clown in the group, he is the Jew that gives up the respect of his peers and relinquishes the grip on his steady life in scientific study purely so he can compete in a beer drinking contest, additionally, the 'eye of the Jew' sequence when it arrives is done in pretty poor taste.So these guys get their team together in an attempt to win over the beer drinking contest held every year in what the film likes to think as a 'Fight Club with beer games' although to call it that is just an insult to Fight Club. Then again, the film is an insult to a lot of things; particularly common sense. Beerfest is an exercise in wrong doing and ill judged jokes; a glorification of the silly, petty and juvenile humor one hopes people will grow out of when they get to a certain age. Beerfest tries to tackle the results of sex whilst under the influence of alcohol in a manner that has its character see and hear things differently to what's real, but the whole thing is unfortunately played for laughs – how many equally absent minded people will see the film and think 'that looks like fun' more so than 'that looks dodgy' and 'I won't be trying that in a hurry'.The film is an exercise in tedium. It's the sort of film that has its central characters turn down half a million in currency for exchange of a daft beer recipe. Others will try to explain to you the principal of it all but perhaps they should give the rest of the film a watch if they want to give a lecture on principals, rights and common sense. Every single scene in Beerfest is a crummy and distasteful display of unfunny humour, poorly placed racism and blatant sexism and that's not including the frog semen gags; the obese jokes and the anti-Semitism all of which was written and performed by people approaching their forties; which is just utterly, utterly frightening.