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After their grandfather dies, Todd and Jan Wolfhouse (Erik Stolhanske and Paul Soter) travel to Germany during Oktoberfest, at the request of their Great Gam Gam (Cloris Leachman), to give him a proper send-off. While they’re there, Todd and Jan are introduced to an underground beer-drinking competition, called Beerfest, where they meet their distant cousins, who happen to be on the world champion German drinking team.
Disgraced by the Germans, who call their grandfather a thief and their Great Gam Gam a whore, Todd and Jan decide that the only way to regain their family honor is to put together an American drinking team—and beat the Germans. So they return to their family-owned bar (the Schnitzengiggle) in Colorado, and, together with their friends—Landfill (Kevin Heffernan), Barry (director Jay Chandrasekhar), and Fink (Steve Lemme)—they begin training for the competition.
There’s not much that I can tell you about Beerfest that you can’t already guess. It’s a movie about drinking large quantities of beer—so I’m sure you can figure out for yourself that it’s filled with drunken escapades and gratuitous nudity and sophomoric humor. If you’re looking for a movie that’s tastefully done, you’re not going to see something called Beerfest. But if you’re looking for something that’s outrageously hilarious after a few beers—something in the tradition of classic beer movies like Strange Brew—then you’ve come to the right place.
Beerfest is funny in that drunken frat boy kind of way. If you’re totally sober, the humor is a little uncomfortable and definitely cringe-inducing at times—but if you’ve had a couple of drinks, you’ll be rolling in the aisles. It’s often so crude that you really won’t want to laugh—but you won’t be able to stop yourself, either. Because, no matter how crude it is, it’s still funny.
Unlike a lot of movies based almost entirely on sophomoric humor, though, Beerfest keeps the laughs going for the whole 110 minutes without going too far and falling flat. The movie doesn’t go on any longer than it should—and it doesn’t waste a lot of time resolving all of its issues. It ends exactly as you expect it to, and that’s it. Because no one really cares about the story, anyway.
Beerfest is the perfect movie to see late at night…with the guys…after finishing off a keg. It’s one of those movies that will inevitably find its way into the DVD collections of college students everywhere. But if you decide to see it in the theater, be sure it’s a theater that sells beer at the concession stand—or, at the very least, a theater that has a bar within stumbling distance.
