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I Blame Evan Williams: Thomas&Moranis's STRANGE BREW

 Rick Moranis, Dave Thomas, Max Von Sydow, Paul Dooley. Dir. Dave Thomas & Rick Moranis, MGM, 1983


Evan Williams is a bastard. More accurately, Evan Williams black label turns me into a surly bastard, but if I go with my first sentence I get to blame him rather than myself for my underwhelmed response to STRANGE BREW, one of my more embarrassing '80s oversights, when I finally saw it last year. It had to have been the bourbon, because I finally re-watched it today, stoned, and laughed my ass off. Of course, the last time I got super high after a few sober days and watched movies, I gave THE GREAT OUTDOORS an ecstatic writeup and criticized UNCLE BUCK for being too dark, so...yeah. That happened.

As I've said before, my movie fandom blossomed in the '80s when I was a teenager/young adult and I pride myself on having seen most of the '80s-movie staples at the multiplex or on VHS by the end of the decade. It's inevitable to miss a few, I suppose, but I'm always a little embarrassed by some of my blank spots, like BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, or THE LAST EMPORER, or Dave Thomas & Rick Moranis's Bob&Doug MacKenzie-comedy, STRANGE BREW.

STRANGE BREW particularly embarrasses me, as I was a big SCTV fan, a big fan of the MacKenzie Brothers skits, and of their 1981 comedy album, THE GREAT WHITE NORTH, particularly its hit single, "Take Off," featuring Rush's Geddy Lee on vocals. The MacKenzies returned the favor, appearing in a short video screened during tour stops on Rush's SIGNALS tour (which I saw in Cincinnati in the winter of '83.) Given all that, somehow missing the movie for 37 years, only to finally see it in a whiskey stupor and not find it at all funny not only is embarrassing, it ought to be. What can I tell you - bourbon is not my friend.

I asked Our Man in the Valley, Marc Edward Heuck (follow him on twitter @the_hoyk - he's awesome) to lie for me so I could start out saying I finally saw STRANGE BREW and it was hilarious, rather than I finally saw STRANGE BREW in the right state of mind to understand it IS hilarious, but I can't do that to a friend, even in a writeup this silly.

I write for GenXers and Boomers, mostly, because they get my jokes, so I assume most reading this already know about the MacKenzies, Great White North, SCTV, and STRANGE BREW. If not, Bob&Doug MacKenzie were characters created by Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis for a series of sketches on SCTV, whose popularity led to a record which sold a million copies, and parlayed that success into a deal with MGM for a feature film. Basically, the MacKenzie brothers created the template for SNL's "Wayne's World" and, arguably, such stoner-comedy duos as Bill&Ted and Beavis&Butthead, sort of a beer-soaked, Ontario riff on Vancouver-bred Cheech&Chong.

Their film, STRANGE BREW, loosely parallels HAMLET, recasting Prince Hamlet as Pamela Elsinore (Lynne Griffin), heiress to the Elsinore Brewing fortune, whose mother has married Elsinore's new CEO (Paul Dooley), who schemes with Brewmaster Smith (Von Sydow) to steal the company from her to sell a new, addictive form of their beer which will enslave its drinkers to Smith's will. The MacKenzies more or less play Rosencrantz&Guildenstern, and STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE's Angus MacInnes ("We're too close!") plays Ophelia, drowning along with the MacKenzies at the end of Act I, thus following the story that far. Act II finds the Brothers and McInnes resurrected, of course, and from there the movie pretty much abandons the Bard and lets its Hamlet and Ophelia kick ass and save the world, or Toronto, from Smith's nefarious scheme. Personally, I hate that HAMLET's four best characters all die, and I guess Thomas&Moranis did, too. If STRANGE BREW is clearly no threat to HAMLET, I think I like its ending a little better. I know its climax, involving a flying dog painted up as a skunk, moved me almost as much as HAMLET's "Watch me drink poison and stab people."

I laughed pretty much nonstop today. If the above doesn't convince someone who's also missed STRANGE BREW to give it a look, I don't think anything else I could say will. I'm so glad I stopped drinking.



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