In a month of over-obvious movie titles (How to Eat Fried Worms, Snakes on a Plane), Beerfest is actually the most accurate one yet, a hard-partying comedy that runs exclusively on beer jokes for a duration of almost two hours.

Drunk, audiences might be able to stomach these sophomoric shenanigans for that long. Stoned (as a gaggle of girls at the press screening seemed to be), every joke provokes fits of giggles. But sober, this kind of material is an acquired taste at best and downright unbearable in stretches.

And yet, the movie has the makings of an instant cult classic, sure to grow funnier among its devoted fans with each successive viewing. It's over-the-top enough that certain scenes will go down in the annals of movie history (a character named "Landfill" trying to drink his way out of a giant beer vat, sneaking into the Beerfest championship in a "Trojan keg"), while other lines will inevitably make their way into the cultural lexicon (the way God-awful stoner comedy Dude, Where's My Car? did).

If Sideways managed to give alcoholism an upscale intellectual twist, Beerfest does just the opposite. There are no insights into the human condition here, no metaphoric monologues on the personal appeal of Pinot Noir, just wall-to-wall outrageousness. The thing is, there's a sizable contingent of the movie-going public who would gladly take this over such pretentious wine worship any day. In fact, if you can make it through the first 30 minutes, in which some of the rudest and most inappropriate jokes surface, then the movie actually hits its unapologetically offensive stride.

Director Jay Chandrasekhar (Dukes of Hazzard) and his Broken Lizard cronies may be lacking any sense of good taste, but their comic timing is sharp enough to get laughs from audiences who want nothing more than an irreverent drinking game. "Drinking" seems too casual a word for what the characters in Beerfest do. Once a glass touches someone's lips, the eager alcoholic at the other end won't lower it until chugging the entire contents (although the camera frequently cuts away between the first sip and last swallow to give the actors a break). "The performers are professionals," warns an opening title card. "If you attempt to drink this much, YOU WILL DIE."

They're not kidding. Beerfest features more beer consumed on screen than any movie since Strange Brew, while simultaneously offering less in the way of redeeming social value than Freddy Got Fingered.

If that's your thing, bottom's up!

[as featured in The Miami Herald]