The Adventures of Bob & Doug McKenzie: Strange Brew is a 1983 film starring the popular SCTV characters Bob & Doug McKenzie, played by Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis, who also served as co-directors. Max von Sydow co-stars. The story is loosely based on the Shakespearean play Hamlet, with the McKenzie Brothers taking the roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Most of the film was shot in the Southern Ontario[1] area. Toronto, Kitchener, and Hamilton[2] were the main locations. Parts of the movie were also filmed in Prince George, British Columbia.[3]
Plot
It begins like a typical Great White North sketch on SCTV, but then cuts away to the story. Two unemployed brothers, Bob and Doug McKenzie, are in a bind when they give away their father's beer money and then run out of beer. The brothers place a mouse in a beer bottle in an attempt to get free Elsinore beer from the local beer store, but are told to take up the matter at the Elsinore brewery instead. After presenting the evidence to management at Elsinore brewery, the brothers are given jobs on the bottling line inspecting the bottles for mice. They take this opportunity to drink lots of free beer off the line; later, they surprise their parents with a van full of Elsinore products.
Meanwhile, the evil Brewmeister Smith (von Sydow) is perfecting a secret plan to take over the world by putting a drug in Elsinore beer which, while otherwise rendering the consumer docile, makes him or her attack others when stimulated by musical tones. Smith tests this adulterated beer on patients of the conveniently located Royal Canadian Institute for the Mentally Insane, which is connected by underground tunnels to the brewery. The effects of the tainted beer are demonstrated in an extended sequence during which the mental patients don armored Star Wars–style hockey garb and, after consuming the beer, respond to synthesizer music by variously playing hockey, skating together in sync, and brawling on the ice.
It seems the former brewery owner John Elsinore has recently died under mysterious circumstances and his daughter, Pam (Lynne Griffin), having recently turned 21, has been given full control of the Elsinore brewery. Pam's uncle Claude (Paul Dooley), in the interim, had married her widowed mother and is reluctant to give up his recently-gained control of the brewery. The reason for this is further revealed to be that Claude is collaborating with Brewmeister Smith, for whom he is a bumbling pawn, providing a cover for the Brewmeister's nefarious plans.
Bob and Doug blunder into the midst of these plans when they rescue Pam from a malfunctioning security gate and develop a friendly relationship with her. They explore and find an abandoned cafeteria containing an old Galactic Border Patrol that supernaturally reveals that Brewmeister Smith murdered John Elsinore and that Uncle Claude was deeply involved. Additionally, while poking around the brewery, Bob and Doug meet a one time hockey great, Jean "Rosie" LeRose (Angus MacInnes), whom Bob recognizes from the hockey card he has back home at his parents' house. Having suffered a career-ending nervous breakdown and fallen under Smith's control, Rosie gets locked up at the Insane Asylum but is determined to fight against the Brewmeister's plot for world domination.
Eventually, Bob and Doug stumble their way into Brewmeister's operations room while he is away, and Doug stashes a record of John Elsinore's murder, believing that it is bootleg music. Immediately afterward, Brewmeister and Claude shoot the brothers with tranquilizers. When they wake up, they are back in their truck, convinced that their discoveries were all just dreams, and are instructed to deliver two kegs of beer (actually containing an unconscious Pam and her father's friend, Henry Green) to a party at the bottom of a big hill. However, the brakes have been tampered to only allow 2 stops before giving out altogether. Nevertheless, as Bob and Doug drive, they soon get distracted and decide to stop off at their house to feed their dog. Having wasted one stop prior, they find themselves unable to control the vehicle and eventually wind up careening off of a dock into the lake.
The police rescue Pam and the badly injured Henry, and assume that the Mackenzie brothers are dead, seeing as they have not surfaced the water for 10 minutes. When they send down a pair of scuba divers to inspect the truck, however, they find that Bob and Doug never left their seats. They survived by inhaling air which was trapped in the many empty bottles rolling about in the van. With them is also Rosie, who had provided his last breath to Pam earlier for her survival, and would have died if the brothers had not saved him as well. Unfortunately the accident causes memory loss for Pam, and the brothers are therefore framed for the attempted murder of Pam Elsinore and Henry Green.
When put to trial, Bob and Doug's antics cause the judge to deem them insane, and he puts them under Brewmeister Smith's care at the Royal Canadian Institute for the Mentally Insane. Brewmeister assigns one of his cohorts Ted to find out everything that the brothers know about what they saw at the brewery, but they just end up frustrating him more with their childlike innocence. Rosie soon finds them and helps them escape, and they later find Pam and rescue her as well. Rosie, having figured out Brewmeister's dastardly plan, arranges an uprising from the brainwashed test subjects. Doug leads half of the hockey players to the shipping dock, where they shove Claude into the labeling machine until he can be arrested. Rosie leads the other half to Brewmeister's control room, where Smith manages to kill each of them except for Rosie, who shoves him into a light board where John Elsinore's ghost (who had been haunting all of the electrical devices at the brewery, including the arcade game) effectively zaps him to death.
All the while, Smith had locked Pam and Bob into a huge brewery tank that he began slowly filling with beer. Doug, Rosie, and the police eventually track them down and open the hatch. To their surprise, not a drop of liquid flows out. Pam climbs out and explains that Bob drank all the beer. (Bob has now cartoonishly grown to over 2 stories big.) She runs to the cafeteria and finds her father's ghost, who tells her of how Brewmeister has already shipped out his free tainted beer to Oktoberfest and tells her to stop them. Doug tries his best to figure out where to take Bob to so he can take an enormous leak. When they hear that a wing of the brewery is on fire, Doug recruits him to extinguish it.
After they put the fire out, the police ask for their help in stopping the Oktoberfest fiasco. They all go back to the boys' home and find their dog, Hosehead, who resembles a large skunk, to invade the party. Hosehead runs down the street and begins to fly like Krypto (briefly wearing a cape that he loses to the wind) over the city, until he crashes down through the tent of the celebration and effectively scares everyone outside.
In the end, the McKenzie Brothers save the day and Pam and Rosie find true love. As for the contaminated beer, Bob and Doug are allowed to haul away the lot to apparently try to drink it all.
A loose framing story style is employed in the movie; the opening shows the McKenzies at movie premiere for Mutants of 2051 A.D., which they return to at the close of the main story.
Cast
The McKenzies' father is voiced by veteran Looney Tunes voice actor Mel Blanc.
Production
In 1981, Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas recorded a Bob and Doug McKenzie comedy album which sold a million copies.[4] Based on this success, they thought about parlaying that into a feature film.[5] After fellow SCTV cast member John Candy got an offer from Universal Pictures to do a film called Going Berserk, Moranis and Thomas started talking about writing a screenplay for a Bob and Doug film. Andrew Alexander, executive producer for SCTV reminded them that he had exclusive contracts with the two men and if they wrote a script he would sue them.[5] Moranis and Thomas soon found themselves faced with the challenge of expanding their improvisations on SCTV from "two guys talking about how hard it was to get parking spaces in donut shops to a full-length story", Thomas said in an interview.[4]
They hired Steve De Jarnatt to write the first draft.[5] Initially, Thomas told De Jarnatt that he wanted to base the film's story around Hamlet but he ended up being too faithful to the play and was told be more creative with the parallels to it. Moranis and Thomas' agents sent the script to various Hollywood studios and a few days later they had a deal with MGM based not on the script but on record sales, "the breakout potential, and the fact that it was being advertised on a television show", Thomas remembers.[5] They were unhappy with the script because Bob and Doug were improvised characters done in their "comic voices" and they felt that nobody but themselves could write for these characters.[5] Thomas began rewriting the script without Moranis who was now uncertain about doing the film. After working on the first 50 pages, Moranis took a look at what Thomas had done and they worked together rewriting it. However, they were not sure just how much they could legally change and did most of the changes in the first third of the script, including the addition of Bob and Doug's science fiction film, Mutants of 2051 A.D., Bob and Doug watching it in a movie theater, and causing a riot. Thomas remembers that the script was "far more bizarre and conceptual in the beginning ... if we had been able to rewrite the whole thing, we would have made the whole thing like that".[5]
Originally, Moranis and Thomas were not going to direct or write the film but ended up doing both with the guidance of executive producer Jack Grossberg, who had produced films by Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. They were subsequently given a budget of $5 million.[4] Before filming, all of the major breweries wanted the McKenzie brothers to appear in beer advertisements. The filmmakers had the promise of Molson's Brewery but once the brewery found out that there was a joke in the film about putting a mouse in a beer bottle so that a complaint can be made in order to get free beer, they distanced themselves from the film. The filmmakers were also banned from filming in a Brewers Retail store. They ended up building a replica of the store at a cost of more than $45,000 and used the Old Fort Brewing Co. in Prince George, British Columbia.[4]
Reception
Strange Brew currently holds a 68% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with a 77% rating from users of the site.[6] In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Anyone who's partial to the McKenzies' humor doubtless has a fondness for beer. The price of a ticket could buy enough beer for an experience at least as memorable as this one".[7] Gary Arnold, in his review for the Washington Post, wrote, "Neither triumph nor fiasco, Strange Brew leaves plenty of room for improvement, but I hope Thomas and Moranis get the chance to demonstrate that they've learned a lot from the mixed assortment of nuttiness in their first movie comedy".[8] In his review for the Globe and Mail, Jay Scott wrote, "What's terrific about the McKenzie Brothers is their offhand depiction of two English-Canadian working-class dimwits ... and what's terrific about the movie is its equally offhand surrealism".[9]
References
- ^ Internet Movie Database - Filming locations for The Adventures of Bob & Doug McKenzie: Strange Brew
- ^ "Internet Movie Database - List of Films shot in Hamilton, Ontario". http://www.imdb.com/List?endings=on&&locations=Hamilton,+Ontario,+Canada. Retrieved 2008-01-29.
- ^ ShowBC - Filmed in Prince George
- ^ a b c d Godfrey, Stephen (August 26, 1983). "Hoser Brothers Hope Beer Film will Take Off, Eh?". Globe and Mail.
- ^ a b c d e f Plume, Kenneth (February 10, 2000). "Interview with Dave Thomas". IGN. http://movies.ign.com/articles/035/035845p1.html. Retrieved 2009-07-22.
- ^ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/strange_brew/
- ^ Maslin, Janet (August 26, 1983). "Men in Quest of Beer". The New York Times: pp. 8.
- ^ Arnold, Gary (August 30, 1983). "Silly, Promising Brew From the Great White North". Washington Post: pp. B4.
- ^ Scott, Jay (August 27, 1983). "Hosers brew up a batch of real big-screen fun, eh". Globe and Mail.
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