Our heroes enter a competition before they are ready, get beat, and spend a good portion of the movie assembling a team and getting better in order to knock off the top team in the world. The movie follows the familiar sports film formula. The movie does not neglect any ethnicity in its slash-and-burn march to comedy, but special venom is reserved for the Deutschlanders (yes, someone gets called a "Deutsch-bag"). The ridiculous caricature of the German team is one of the true pleasures of the film. Their revenge, of course, is to return to Beerfest and take down the haughty Germans. After a few plot contrivances and some other bullcorn, the guys get embroiled in the seedy underground of beer-drinking. The Broken Lizard guys are smart to include a couple of nods to his role in the famous U-boat film (including a great scene set inside a submarine), but never take it too far. The incomparable Jurgen Prochnow (of Das Boot and House of the Dead fame) presides over this ages-old display of drinking machismo, and he is hilarious playing against type. The event serves as a veritable Olympiad of brew-slamming, with each country fielding a team of its finest alcoholic warriors. They get blamed for accidentally disrupting the sacred festival and (for some reason) flee to a place even more ridiculous-a top-secret underground beer-drinking competition known as Beerfest. Once the guys are set in motion, they end up at Oktoberfest, where there is much drinking, a good deal of toplessness and a whole lot of mayhem. She's no Frau Blucher here, but it is fun to hear Dame Cloris cussing up a storm. Of course their grandmother is Cloris Leachman, who years previous perfected the archetype of the kooky German lady in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein. After a hilarious cameo by Donald Sutherland as the deceased (who appears during the will reading), the Wolfhouse boys are sent on a quest to take their grandfather's ashes to Germany. The story follows Jan and Todd Wolfhouse, who are mourning the passing of their grandfather when the film begins. In between Jay Chandrasekhar directed the mediocre Dukes of Hazzard, but Beerfest is a return to the form that put Broken Lizard on the map with the uproarious Super Troopers. The aptly titled Beerfest is the first true BL film since the ultra-disappointing Club Dread.
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