Movie Review: Beerfest

When my wife told me that we got Beerfest in the mail from Netflix, I was excited. It is not often that a movie is dedicated to the hobby I love: beer. Boy, were my hopes dashed when I actually saw the film.

I had heard about the movie when I was researching my blog post about bierstiefels, glass boots that Germans drink beer out of, as they are featured prominently in the film. I knew then that it was a comedy, and with a name like Beerfest, I knew that it was going likely be a lowbrow comedy mostly about drinking.

The plot is as follows:

At the request of their grandmother, Todd and Jan Wolfhouse travel to Munich, Germany, to deliver their recently deceased grandfather's ashes to be with the family. While there at Oktoberfest, they stumble upon a fightclub like competition involving drinking beer, called Beerfest. There the two brothers find their long lost German cousins, the Von Wolfhausens. The cousins humiliate them throw them out of the event, claiming that their grandfather stole the recipe for the best beer in Germany from their family in Germany.

Upon returning to the states, the two brothers round up a dream team of beer drinkers from their past to train for and return to Munich to compete in next year's Beerfest. While training, they discover the secret recipe and along with other family secrets.

The story climaxes with their triumphant return to Beerfest, to compete against the German cousins for control of the recipe and the family's brewery in Germany.

Maybe I do not understand lowbrow humor, but really poorly executed German accents are not funny. Calling a bierstiefel "das boot" is not funny. Having one of the characters who is a scientist make a living at masturbating frogs could have been funny, but it was not. Turning the grandma character into a slut simply was not that funny. Drowning a main character in a vat of beer was not funny. It was all very absurd, and tried very hard to be funny, but simply was not funny.

I think I would have enjoyed the movie if I was like fourteen, where beer and boobs (which are also prominently featured in the film) are pretty much forbidden fruit. However, for some pushing forty like myself, the whole thing was lame.

Maybe I should have gotten drunk first -- I mean really drunk. That way I would have passed out and not remembered that I'd seen the film.

I'm my opinion, skip this one. As a result, I will not add it to my sidebar.