Beerfest

Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar

The brood of improv actors collectively known as Broken Lizard (Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, Erik Stolhanske and Jay Chandrasekhar) have produced four features together (Puddle Cruiser, Super Troopers, Club Dread and The Dukes of Hazzard) before their current summer froth, Beerfest.

For this go around, the half-baked, pretzel-like plot twists around two American brothers determined to claim their German ancestral heritage—an aristocratic title and ownership of the famous family brewery. As their fans have come to expect, the story’s overly salted with sophomoric, rampantly salacious humor.

When the boys visit Bavaria to scatter their recently deceased dad’s ashes, their evil and conniving cousins tell them their father (Donald Sutherland) was born out of wedlock, and that their beloved and still-kicking Great Gam Gam (Cloris Leachman) was a serving girl-cum-whore who stole the family’s top-secret beer recipe before fleeing to America. Even worse, the cousins out-drink the brothers at Beerfest, the annual beer drinking competition held clandestinely at a concealed beer hall somewhere in Munich.

Vowing revenge, the brothers enlist a team of beer brawling buddies to defeat the cousins at the following year’s bout. They train by guzzling dozens of steins of suds, bouncing balls into mugs and trick drinking from “das boot.” The action flows predictably with beer barrels tossed, rivals coming to fisticuffs and a brigade of lovely frauleins dropping their dirndles to bare their breasts. Can you just imagine the hilarity of it all?

Consider downing your own barrel of suds before entering the theater—it might all seem a bit funnier when drunk. And, if you can’t sit for some of the film’s obscenities, you then have the perfect excuse to empty your bladder or puke in private. On the other hand, you’ll want to relieve yourself before Cloris Leachman jerks off (yes, she really does) a big, fat, juicy-looking wiener. With that truly nauseating moment as one of its highlights, Beerfest is, as an American drinker calls his German counterpart, a real “Deutchbag.”

Beerfest gushes with lamentably lowbrow humor—of the beer dowsing, off-key yodeling, surgically-enhanced boobs variety—that drives testosterone-driven, post-pubescent males (and their female cohorts) seeking summer’s last laughs absolutely wild.

Of course, since I’m not a member of that frat, hey, what the “phi-upsilon-asterisk-kappa” do I know?