After the pricey palaver of the big-studio “Dukes of Hazzard,” the gentlemen writer-performers of the Broken Lizard comedy team—Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Herrernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, Erik Stolhanske—return to the lower-budget regions of comedy filmmaking with “Beerfest.” It’s a slapdash assembly of jokes about drunkenness and drinking games with fortysomething performers pretending to be twenty years younger. There are a few moments that made me snort—director Chandrasekhar’s character, whose street-level sexual predilections make for squirmy comedy, has a moment where he wakes up naked beside a slaughtered, likely violated deer, and scurries into a field of reeds with a Tony Perkins-like, “No! Not again!” This sort of surrealism rarely surfaces: mostly it’s a bunch of jokes about Germans and beer that aren’t funny because they aren’t based in any recognizable human behavior or cultural truths. Truth = Funny, dammit! 115m. 2.35 anamorphic widescreen. (Ray Pride)
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