I keep thinking the comedies of the 80’s were all oversexed, but then I forgot about such glorious outliers as Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, which seemed to subvert every expectation one might have for a comedy from a major studio at the time. Almost as audacious, but not quite as good, is 1983’s Strange Brew.
This brings SCTV’s Bob and Doug McKenzie (Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas) to the big screen, in what would be their only feature film as these characters. On that show, their shtick was riffing on Canadian stereotypes, in the context of them hosting a public access show called The Great White North. Their world boils down to beer, donuts, beer, hockey and beer.
Obviously, a feature film would have to expand beyond that conceit, so the movie we’re watching initially proves to be a movie within the movie, and even that has a movie within that: an extremely amateurish post-apocalyptic sci-fi made by the brothers, set “ten years after world war four” (fortunately, that film is not their take on A Boy and His Dog). We then see the outraged audience watching that film storm out of the theater. The brothers escape through the theater’s emergency exit and I like the bit where they try to make amends to guy in the alleyway who has two crying children: “They’ve been saving their allowance for weeks to see this movie. What am I supposed to tell them? What am I supposed to tell them?!”
With this business out of the way, we’re on to the movie proper. I would have expected everything here to be sketch-based without any overall plot. Instead, we get the McKenzies stumbling into employment at the Elsinore brewery and finding themselves in a bizarre conspiracy. To think their journey begins with them trying to scam free beer by claiming they found a mouse in a bottle of beer. A great touch is the mouse in the bottle Thomas uses as evidence is alive. I love how none of the characters seem to notice this. As for myself, I wondered the filmmakers got the live mouse through the tiny neck of the bottle.
Something is obviously amiss at the brewery. Just it being immediately adjacent to a mental institution arouses suspicions. That the place is almost bereft of workers is even more bizarre. Aside from Bob and Doug on mouse-monitoring duty alongside the conveyor belt, the only other employees seemingly doing any work directly related to beer production are Angus MacInnes and Douglas Campbell.
I should make that “non-evil beer production”, because some others at the facility are involved in a nefarious plot to add a drug to the product which will give them full control of its consumers. Max von Sydow makes a surprising appearance as the diabolical mastermind behind the plot. Brian McConnachie is his technician who seems to do all the actual labor involved in implementing that plan, such as subjecting inmates at the asylum to the tainted beer and monitoring the results. Paul Dooley plays a schemey but deeply stupid middle management type who was involved in the death of his brother, the founder of the brewery, and is now trying to wrest control of Elsinore from his niece (Lynne Griffin). I suspect Dooley is regarded as so incompetent as to not even be trusted to commit the murder he set out to do: “He was already dead when I killed him!”
The test done on the inmates to ensure they can be controlled is unusual. The loonies (and, by that, I mean the crazies from next door and not the Canadian currency) are kitted out in hockey gear that looks closer to that of the Storm Troopers from Star Wars. That makes for a bizarre meta moment when MacInnes is wearing that gear, because he was Gold Leader in that film.
Vastly more important than the plot is the question of whether the picture is funny. As always, humor is even more in the eye of the beholder than beauty, but I found this film to be hilarious. Most of the humor comes from the interactions more than anything else. I love a line, supposedly improvised, when Moranis says to Griffin, “I’d kiss you if I didn’t have puke breath.” Moranis also has a weird aside about the synthesizer used to control the drugged inmates, “Hey, look, this piano has a computer.” There’s weird little visual bits, like an arcade game titled “Galactic Border Patrol”. There are even a couple of shock moments, such as the brothers catching their parents in bed, with Moranis being the mom and Thomas the dad.
One moment reminded me of the type of genre-breaking done so perfectly in Big Adventure. Doug is driving a van and Bob is in the passenger seat. Bob asks Doug if he’s ever noticed how, in movies, somebody who is driving will often turn to the other person and carry on a long conversation without watching the road. Doug then folds his arms across his chest, turns his head towards his brother and proceeds to do exactly that. There’s also an unusual spin on the MGM logo at the beginning, with the lion belching.
There are some elements of the film that were simply odd. The computer discs that control the evil operation at the brewery are unlike any other media I have seen, something like the old 5 ¼” floppies, but with rounded corners. Not sure why I am unable to stop thinking about those, but that’s just my nature. Another element I can’t seem to stop thinking about is a brief bit where the McKenzie’s dog drops one of those discs off the roof of their house so that a police detective will find it. In a deeply uncanny moment that goes by in a blink, the dog then rolls back up the roof of the house and over the edge. I keep waiting for that to creep into my nightmares.
While Strange Brew plays some with the structure of comedy, it isn’t an anarchic as I want it to be. But what truly matters is whether it succeeds as a comedy and, to me, it is deeply funny. Still, I couldn’t help being mildly annoyed it could not sidestep one trapping of the era: a deeply horrible title credits song some executive obviously thought had potential to be a hit single.
Directed by, and starring, Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas
Watched on Warners blu-ray