Reviewed - Beerfest: BROKEN Lizard, the charmless quintet responsible for the crimes against cinema known as Super Troopers and Club Dread, return with another abysmal attempt at comedy in Beerfest.
Immature teen males may well be rolling in the aisles at its juvenile humour, but over the course of an overbearing, over-extended 110 minutes, I managed just a single snigger.
Brothers Todd and Jan Wolfhouse (Erik Stolhan- ske and Paul Soter) are sent to Germany during the Oktoberfest to scatter the ashes of their grandfather, an immigrant played in a caricatured cameo by Donald Sutherland in a funeral video. While in Munich they discover an underground beer consumption contest where their German cousins drink them under the table.
Vowing revenge for this humiliation, the brothers return home and recruit three men for a team to take on the Germans a year later: a prostitute who works the streets (director Jay Chandrasekhar), a hotdog-eating champion aptly nicknamed Landfill (Kevin Heffernan) and a lab technician (Steve Lemme) who masturbates frogs for a living. Hysterical, isn't it?
The consequences are crude, coarse, and determinedly misogynistic and xenophobic, though consistently, pathetically puerile. All the Germans (including one played by respectable Das Boot star Jurgen Prochnow) speak in exaggerated accents that make Peter Sellers's portrayal of Inspector Clouseau seem subtle by comparison.
Presented with a suitcase full of Euro notes, the Americans dismiss the currency as "monopoly money", suggesting they should check out the exchange rate. And Oscar winner Cloris Leachman is slumming it as the great-grandmother of the Wolfhouses, dressed in a folk park Heidi costume and reduced to performing phallic symbolism with a sausage.
