Start with Monty Python, take away most of its merry wit and smarts, add copious breast shots and a toilet bowl or two, and you might have something that looks like Broken Lizard, the - ahem - brain trust behind “Super Troopers” and “Club Dread.” It bills itself as a comedy troupe, but the Broken Lizard guys are more like a comedy frat.
What makes them fun isn’t their talent - talent, what’s that? - but their solidarity. It’s not too hard to imagine them back at Colgate University, where the group originated, plying their adolescent brand of humor for beer-drenched sorority girls.
Beer had to come into play somewhere, yeah? In their latest lowbrow - or lowbrau - opus, “Beerfest,” the Broken Lizard boys tell the story of the Wolfhouse brothers: Todd (Erik Stolhanske) and Jan (Paul Soter), Colorado pub owners who stumble upon a beer-drinking Olympiad in Germany while delivering their grandfather’s ashes to his ancestral home.
Rebuffed and insulted by their grandfather’s fiendish half-brother, Baron Wolfgang von Wolfhausen (Jurgen Prochnow, slumming it big time), the brothers head back to the States, determined to put together a brew-chugging team to restore the family’s good name and bring glory to the U.S.A.
Recruiting some old drinking buddies - including quarters and beer-pong whiz Barry (Jay Chandrasekhar, pulling double-duty as director), speed-drinking prodigy Landfill (Kevin Hoffman) and games theorist Fink (Steve Lemme) - the brothers erect a “training center” behind the pub. And then - what else? - they drink beer. Chandrasekhar and his co-writers shore up the flimsy plot (it makes “Strange Brew” look like “War and Peace”) with giant sandbags of nonsense. Determined to steal the family’s secret beer recipe, the Baron commands a submarine invasion of the Wolfhouse pub, obliging Prochnow to relive his “Das Boot” days: “I get so crazy cooped up in the U-boats I had an experience once.”
Other highlights include: Cloris Leachman slapping a bratwurst, erotic frog stimulation, bad German accents, racial stereotypes aplenty and the obligatory blow-out finale where the Americans go stein-to-stein against the lederhosen-wearing villains. Through it all, the more capable Broken Lizard players (particularly, Chandrasekhar and Heffernan) drag along the others, as if simply jettisoning the dead weight would be a betrayal of their brotherly vows. Kind of touching, actually.
“Beerfest” does show us one thing that we’ve never seen before: A veritable chain-reaction of Janet Jackson-style wardrobe malfunctions. Impressive, but the real boobs are still the guys tapping the keg.
‘Beerfest’
Stars: Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Paul Soter, Erik Stolhanske (collectively, Broken Lizard), Jurgen Prochnow
Behind the scenes: Directed by Chandrasekhar, from a script by Broken Lizard
Rating: R for pervasive crude and sexual content, language, nudity and substance abuse
Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes
Grade: C