BEERFEST

"Drink!"

After the death of their grandfather, Todd (Stolhanske) and Jan (Soter) Wolfhouse travel to Munich to spread his ashes in the land of his birth and it also happens to be Oktoberfest, Germany's beer festival. When they get there however, they are taken to a secret meeting of the world's best drinkers who compete in elite drinking games to be crowned the winners of Beerfest. Challenged by the champions Germany, the two America's are easily beaten but they vow to return a year later. Now all they have to do is find three more team members and train by drinking a lot of beer.

After arresting us in 'Super Trooper' and murdered us on an exotic island in 'Club Dread' but can the Broken Lizard team turn us all into excessive drinkers in 'Beerfest'?

The Broken Lizard troop's movies try and create a 'Saturday Night Live', 'Monty Python' or 'Kids in the Halls' comedy dynamic on the big screen but their last two movies have produced mixed results. 'Super Troopers' poked fun at the differences between Highway Patrol Officers and the county police and 'Club Dread' saw a murderer start a killing spree on a Club Med-like resort but this time they create a 'Fight Club' for beer drinkers.

'Beerfest' is a super secret drinking-game Olympic style event where all the best beer-drinking nations from around the world come together during Oktoberfest in Munich to compete. With games like 'Volume Chug', 'Beer Paddle' and many more, making drinking beer into an extreme sport, this is a movie pokes fun at the ultraconservative nature of Western living and tries to make making drinking cool again. With everyone been total what they can eat, drink or smoke by various governments around the world, the idea of an underground beer drinking competition seems quite plausible.

While the premise might be intriguing, the humour is very basic and unfortunately it doesn't supply any big laughs. Drunken antics are abundant, from beer-goggles to excessive urination all the basics are covers but there is absolutely nothing new here or any surprises. The Broken Lizard team do try to make it as fun as possible but they never manage to raise more than a smile.

Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske write, Chandrasekhar directs and all of them act in their films but this is not always a good thing. The direction is fine but writing and the most importantly the acting isn't that great. Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan and Steve Lemme are gifted comedic actors and really have fun with their characters Barry the former college drinking game legend who fell on bad times, Landfill the extreme eater and drinker and Steve "Fink" Finklestein the scientist with all the theories and experiment with beer. Paul Soter and Stolhanske on the other hand try far too hard and really struggle to make their characters work.

The supporting cast fare a little better. Jürgen Prochnow has fun as the grandfather of the German team, Wolfgang von Wolfhaus. Will Forte, Nat Faxon, Eric Christian Olsen, Ralf Moeller and Gunter Schlierkamp expertly take mickey out of the Germans as the reigning champions and Cloris Leachman is very funny as Great Gam Gam who as a dark secret.

'Beerfest' is a great concept for comedy that suffers from only delivering basic laughs. Instead of a laughfest you get the odd chuckle and the odd smile, making this a rather average pint.

Club Dread

Super Troopers

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2006