Strange Brew

Take off, eh? If you watched Strange Brew in 1983 and enjoyed it, like so many others (including critics) did, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the celluloid has not aged well. The only saving grace of this film are the memories of the early 1980s and the shenanigans of Canadians Bob and Doug McKenzie. The fear is that Strange Brew has been stuffed into a beer-keg-shaped time capsule and will be opened by people who will realize the Rick Moron-is truth about our society.

I always liked the skits on SCTV and the movie is like a cute and funny feature length Bob and Doug skit. Love it!

A comedy loosely based on works of Hamlet starring Rick Moranis, Dave Thomas, and Max Von Sydow Bob and Doug Mackenzie are brothers dreaming of free beer They end up working for Elsinore Brewery Brewmeister Smith is the mastermind behind a scheme of mind-control via drugs prone to certain audio tones so it's up to both of them to stop him They drink plenty of their favorite beer in the meantime Both of them also end up saving Pam, a woman who is the sole heir to the beer company These characters pretty much embody the most obvious Canadian stereotype For a movie from a sketch comedy team it's quite silly Yet harmless given Moranis and Thomas are equivalents of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern So many silly things in here from an ice hockey rink in a beer factory to an overinflated man to a flying dog This ended up having a cult following which makes it one of the rare films based on sketches that gets a pass Nothing great but passable

The goofy humor and exaggerated Canadian accents keep it entertaining for a bit, but the jokes start to get repetitive and the accents get annoying

LOL, the funniest 1.5 hours ever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Terrible movie, eh? Funny movie in the 80's but didn't age well.

I love this movie. This is one I pull out once a year and laugh my butt off at it all over again.

This comedy classic was great. Rick Moranis, Dave Thomas, Max von Sydow, Lynne Griffin, Paul Dooley, Len Doncheff, Angus MacInnes, and the rest of the cast did a great job in this movie. The plot of the movie was entertaining and humorous. It's about a couple of drunk brothers that plan to stop an evil doctor from sending beer with a mind control drug in it to take over the world. If you haven't seen this movie yet, check it out sometime. It's a must see.

It gets old really fast.

I was 11 years old when Strange Brew came out and my excitement was like an average kid felt about jedis. SCTV was -- and will always be -- the best show ever created, after all. Stars Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas created Bob and Doug McKenzie out of necessity. When SCTV moved to CBC, each episode has two minutes more time than those syndicated in the United States. To make up the difference, the CBC network heads asked the show's producers to add specifically identifiable Canadian content for those two minutes, in line with government broadcast regulations. Moranis and Thomas thought that this was totally ridiculous, as the show was already taped in Canada, with a Canadian cast and crew, but then they decided to make a sketch that was as Canadian as it got: The Great White North. At the end of a day's shooting, with just Thomas, Moranis, a single camera operator and lots of Molson, everything was improvised and the best two minutes would air. Thomas said, "Rick and I used to sit in the studio, by ourselves -- almost like happy hour -- drink real beers, cook back bacon, literally make hot snack food for ourselves while we improvised and just talked. It was all very low key and stupid, and we thought, 'Well, they get what they deserve. This is their Canadian content. I hope they like it." They did. They even did in America, where NBC specifically requested more Bob and Doug on the show. There was even a Bob and Doug McKenzie comedy album, The Great White North, which sold a million copies. Based on this success, they considered a movie. After all, John Candy had made Going Berserk. Then Andrew Alexander, executive producer for SCTV, reminded them that he had exclusive contracts with the two men and that if they wrote a script, he would sue them. So how do you take a two-minute sketch and make a movie? You remake Hamlet. Moranis and Thomas were not going to direct or write the film -- Steve De Jarnatt (Cherry 2000, Futuresport, Miracle Mile) is credited with some of the scripting --  but ended up doing both with help from executive producer Jack Grossberg. The movie starts with an angry mob destroying a theater, enraged over the quality of Bob and Doug's movie Mutants of 2051 A.D. before going all in on a new plan: placing a mouse into a bottle of Elsinore beer -- Molson and every other brewer in Canada wanted to be the beer for this movie until they learned that mice would be inside their brews -- and getting free beer for life. Beauty, eh? This plan ends up with both of them working at Elsinore for the mad Brewmeister Smith (Max Von Sydow), who has been brainwashing the patients of the Royal Canadian Institute for the Mentally Insane, using special beer and music to make them into killers. The brewery's former owner, John Elsinore, has passed on under some level of chicanery, leaving his daughter Pam (Lynne Griffin) to be in charge -- and Smith to take over -- and the truth lies in a Galactic Border Patrol video game. Also, a hockey player who had a nervous breakdown, Jean "Rosie" LeRose (Angus MacInnes), is one of the men under the control of Smith. So much more happens -- van crashes, flying dogs, Bob growing to massive size after drinking an entire brewery -- and writing about it makes me want to watch it again. Speaking of Max Von Sydow, the role of Brewmeister Smith was written with him in mind even if that seemed like a quixotic ask. Freddie Fields, then-president of MGM had just produced Victory, so he sent the script. Von Sydow showed it to his son, who was a huge SCTV fan and that's how it all came true.