Strange Brew
Encyclopedia
The Adventures of Bob & Doug McKenzie: Strange Brew is a 1983 Canadian comedy film
starring the popular SCTV
characters Bob and Doug McKenzie
, played by Dave Thomas
and Rick Moranis
, who also served as co-directors. Max von Sydow
co-stars.
Most of the film was shot in the Southern Ontario
area. Toronto
, Scarborough
, Kitchener
, and Hamilton
were the main locations. Parts of the movie were also filmed in Prince George
, British Columbia
.
(Dave Thomas
and Rick Moranis
), are in a bind when they squander their father's beer money and then run out of beer. The brothers place a live mouse in a beer bottle in an attempt to blackmail
the local beer store
into giving them free Elsinore beer, but are told to take up the matter at the Elsinore brewery instead. After presenting the mouse to management at the 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 present their parents with a van full of Elsinore products.
Meanwhile, the evil Brewmeister Smith (Max von Sydow
) is perfecting a secret plan to take over the world by placing a mind-control drug in Elsinore beer which, while rendering the consumer docile, also makes him or her attack others when stimulated by certain 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 the bumbling Claude is collaborating with Brewmeister Smith, for whom he is a buffoonish toady, 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 become friends with her. While exploring the massive brewery, they find a shuttered cafeteria containing an old Galactic Border Patrol video game 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 wander into Brewmeister's operations room while he is away, and Doug takes a floppy disk
containing video of John Elsinore's murder, believing that it is a New Wave
bootleg record. Immediately afterward, Brewmeister and Claude shoot the brothers with tranquilizers. When they wake up, they are back in their van, convinced that their suspicious 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 modified 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 stop the now-speeding vehicle and eventually wind up jumping off of the Toronto pier into Lake Ontario
. The police rescue Pam (who was shot with a tranquilizer dart by Smith before she could talk to police) and the badly injured Henry from the kegs, 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 van, 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 declare 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 to find out everything that the brothers know about what they saw at the brewery, but they just end up frustrating him with their childishness and comical behavior. Rosie soon finds them and helps them escape, and they later find Pam and rescue her as well. Rosie, having figured out Brewmeister's plan, foments an uprising among 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 subdue 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 two stories tall.) 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
. Bob warns Doug and Rosie to move away, and emits a powerful belch which blows off the end of the tank. When they hear that a wing of the brewery is on fire, Doug recruits Bob to extinguish it by urinating, returning him to normal size.
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 beer-drinking dog, Hosehead, who resembles a large skunk, to invade the party. Enticed by free beer and sausages, 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.
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. 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.
They hired Steve De Jarnatt
to write the first draft. 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. 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. 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".
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. 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. The exterior shots of the store (now a Tim Hortons
/Pizza Pizza
) were shot in Scarborough, Ontario at the corner of Eglinton Ave and Midland Ave. The KFC
and Petro-Canada
gas station seen in the background still exist. 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. The emergency vehicles used during filming were all real Metropolitan Toronto Police squad cars. The Ambulances used briefly were on loan from Metropolitan Toronto Ambulance
.
, with a 79% rating from users of the site. 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". 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". 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".
, included as part of the album's futuristic dystopian backstory, explains that the vintage movie of the day Strange Brew 'chronicles the heroic adventures of two latter day renaissance men, or, to use the correct 20th century terminology, "hoser
s"'. The fictional reviewer awards the film three thumbs up.
Comedy film
Comedy film is a genre of film in which the main emphasis is on humour. They are designed to elicit laughter from the audience. Comedies are mostly light-hearted dramas and are made to amuse and entertain the audiences...
starring the popular SCTV
Second City Television
Second City Television is a Canadian television sketch comedy show offshoot from Toronto's The Second City troupe that ran between 1976 and 1984.- Premise :...
characters Bob and Doug McKenzie
Bob and Doug McKenzie
Bob and Doug McKenzie are a pair of fictional Canadian brothers who hosted "Great White North", a sketch which was introduced on SCTV for the show's third season when it moved to CBC Television in 1980. Bob is played by Rick Moranis and Doug is played by Dave Thomas...
, played by Dave Thomas
Dave Thomas (actor)
David "Dave" Thomas is a Canadian comedian and actor. He was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, but moved to Durham, North Carolina where his father, John E. Thomas, attended Duke University and earned a PhD in Philosophy. Thomas attended George Watts and Moorehead elementary schools...
and Rick Moranis
Rick Moranis
Frederick Allan "Rick" Moranis is a Canadian comedian, actor, musician, and a magician. Moranis came to prominence in the late 1970s on the sketch comedy show Second City Television, and later appeared in several Hollywood films including Strange Brew; Ghostbusters; Spaceballs; Little Shop of...
, who also served as co-directors. Max von Sydow
Max von Sydow
Max von Sydow is a Swedish actor. He has also held French citizenship since 2002. He has starred in many films and had supporting roles in dozens more...
co-stars.
Most of the film was shot in the Southern Ontario
Southern Ontario
Southern Ontario is a region of the province of Ontario, Canada that lies south of the French River and Algonquin Park. Depending on the inclusion of the Parry Sound and Muskoka districts, its surface area would cover between 14 to 15% of the province. It is the southernmost region of...
area. Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
, Scarborough
Scarborough, Ontario
Scarborough is a dissolved municipality within the city of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Geographically, it comprises the eastern part of Toronto. It is bordered on the south by Lake Ontario, on the west by Victoria Park Avenue, on the north by Steeles Avenue East, and on the east by the Rouge River...
, Kitchener
Kitchener, Ontario
The City of Kitchener is a city in Southern Ontario, Canada. It was the Town of Berlin from 1854 until 1912 and the City of Berlin from 1912 until 1916. The city had a population of 204,668 in the Canada 2006 Census...
, and Hamilton
Hamilton, Ontario
Hamilton is a port city in the Canadian province of Ontario. Conceived by George Hamilton when he purchased the Durand farm shortly after the War of 1812, Hamilton has become the centre of a densely populated and industrialized region at the west end of Lake Ontario known as the Golden Horseshoe...
were the main locations. Parts of the movie were also filmed in Prince George
Prince George, British Columbia
Prince George, with a population of 71,030 , is the largest city in northern British Columbia, Canada, and is known as "BC's Northern Capital"...
, British Columbia
British Columbia
British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is known for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . Its name was chosen by Queen Victoria in 1858...
.
Plot
Two unemployed brothers, Bob and Doug McKenzieBob and Doug McKenzie
Bob and Doug McKenzie are a pair of fictional Canadian brothers who hosted "Great White North", a sketch which was introduced on SCTV for the show's third season when it moved to CBC Television in 1980. Bob is played by Rick Moranis and Doug is played by Dave Thomas...
(Dave Thomas
Dave Thomas (actor)
David "Dave" Thomas is a Canadian comedian and actor. He was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, but moved to Durham, North Carolina where his father, John E. Thomas, attended Duke University and earned a PhD in Philosophy. Thomas attended George Watts and Moorehead elementary schools...
and Rick Moranis
Rick Moranis
Frederick Allan "Rick" Moranis is a Canadian comedian, actor, musician, and a magician. Moranis came to prominence in the late 1970s on the sketch comedy show Second City Television, and later appeared in several Hollywood films including Strange Brew; Ghostbusters; Spaceballs; Little Shop of...
), are in a bind when they squander their father's beer money and then run out of beer. The brothers place a live mouse in a beer bottle in an attempt to blackmail
Blackmail
In common usage, blackmail is a crime involving threats to reveal substantially true or false information about a person to the public, a family member, or associates unless a demand is met. It may be defined as coercion involving threats of physical harm, threat of criminal prosecution, or threats...
the local beer store
Brewers Retail Inc.
The Beer Store is the trading name for Brewers Retail, a privately owned, joint-venture chain of retail outlets in Ontario, Canada, founded in 1927. The articles of incorporation stipulate that Brewers Retail cannot sell "hard liquor" , or consumer goods...
into giving them free Elsinore beer, but are told to take up the matter at the Elsinore brewery instead. After presenting the mouse to management at the brewery, the brothers are given jobs on the bottling line
Assembly line
An assembly line is a manufacturing process in which parts are added to a product in a sequential manner using optimally planned logistics to create a finished product much faster than with handcrafting-type methods...
inspecting the bottles for mice. They take this opportunity to drink lots of free beer off the line; later, they present their parents with a van full of Elsinore products.
Meanwhile, the evil Brewmeister Smith (Max von Sydow
Max von Sydow
Max von Sydow is a Swedish actor. He has also held French citizenship since 2002. He has starred in many films and had supporting roles in dozens more...
) is perfecting a secret plan to take over the world by placing a mind-control drug in Elsinore beer which, while rendering the consumer docile, also makes him or her attack others when stimulated by certain 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
Star Wars
Star Wars is an American epic space opera film series created by George Lucas. The first film in the series was originally released on May 25, 1977, under the title Star Wars, by 20th Century Fox, and became a worldwide pop culture phenomenon, followed by two sequels, released at three-year...
–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
Lynne Griffin
Lynne Griffin is a Canadian actress. She is known for her work in film, television and stage.Griffin was born in Toronto, Ontario, the daughter of Kay, an actress, and James Joseph Griffin, a fashion photographer and soccer player. Currently, she is married to fellow actor Sean Gregory Sullivan.-...
), having recently turned 21, has been given full control of the Elsinore brewery. Pam's uncle Claude (Paul Dooley
Paul Dooley
-Personal life:Dooley was born Paul Dooley Brown in Parkersburg, West Virginia, the son of Ruth Irene , a homemaker, and Peter James Brown, a factory worker. Dooley was a cartoonist as a youth and drew a strip for a local paper in Parkersburg. He joined the Navy before discovering acting while at...
), 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 the bumbling Claude is collaborating with Brewmeister Smith, for whom he is a buffoonish toady, 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 become friends with her. While exploring the massive brewery, they find a shuttered cafeteria containing an old Galactic Border Patrol video game 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
Angus MacInnes
Angus MacInnes is a Canadian actor. He is most famous for his role as Gold Leader in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, and as former hockey great Jean "Rosey" LaRose in the comedy Strange Brew...
), whom Bob recognizes from the hockey card he has back home at his parents' house. Having suffered a career-ending nervous breakdown
Nervous breakdown
Mental breakdown is a non-medical term used to describe an acute, time-limited phase of a specific disorder that presents primarily with features of depression or anxiety.-Definition:...
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
Megalomania
Megalomania is a psycho-pathological condition characterized by delusional fantasies of power, relevance, or omnipotence. 'Megalomania is characterized by an inflated sense of self-esteem and overestimation by persons of their powers and beliefs'...
.
Eventually, Bob and Doug wander into Brewmeister's operations room while he is away, and Doug takes a floppy disk
Floppy disk
A floppy disk is a disk storage medium composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic carrier lined with fabric that removes dust particles...
containing video of John Elsinore's murder, believing that it is a New Wave
New Wave music
New Wave is a subgenre of :rock music that emerged in the mid to late 1970s alongside punk rock. The term at first generally was synonymous with punk rock before being considered a genre in its own right that incorporated aspects of electronic and experimental music, mod subculture, disco and 1960s...
bootleg record. Immediately afterward, Brewmeister and Claude shoot the brothers with tranquilizers. When they wake up, they are back in their van, convinced that their suspicious 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 modified 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 stop the now-speeding vehicle and eventually wind up jumping off of the Toronto pier into Lake Ontario
Lake Ontario
Lake Ontario is one of the five Great Lakes of North America. It is bounded on the north and southwest by the Canadian province of Ontario, and on the south by the American state of New York. Ontario, Canada's most populous province, was named for the lake. In the Wyandot language, ontarío means...
. The police rescue Pam (who was shot with a tranquilizer dart by Smith before she could talk to police) and the badly injured Henry from the kegs, 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 van, 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 declare 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 to find out everything that the brothers know about what they saw at the brewery, but they just end up frustrating him with their childishness and comical behavior. Rosie soon finds them and helps them escape, and they later find Pam and rescue her as well. Rosie, having figured out Brewmeister's plan, foments an uprising among 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 subdue 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 two stories tall.) 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
Kitchener-Waterloo Oktoberfest
Kitchener-Waterloo Oktoberfest is an annual nine-day festival in the twin cities of Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Based on the original German Oktoberfest, it is billed as Canada's Greatest Bavarian Festival...
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
Urination
Urination, also known as micturition, voiding, peeing, weeing, pissing, and more rarely, emiction, is the ejection of urine from the urinary bladder through the urethra to the outside of the body. In healthy humans the process of urination is under voluntary control...
. Bob warns Doug and Rosie to move away, and emits a powerful belch which blows off the end of the tank. When they hear that a wing of the brewery is on fire, Doug recruits Bob to extinguish it by urinating, returning him to normal size.
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 beer-drinking dog, Hosehead, who resembles a large skunk, to invade the party. Enticed by free beer and sausages, Hosehead runs down the street and begins to fly like Krypto
Krypto
Krypto, also known as Krypto the Superdog, is a fictional character. He is Superman's pet dog in the various Superman comic books published by DC Comics. Krypto's first appearance was in a Superboy story in Adventure Comics #210 in March 1955...
(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
- Dave ThomasDave Thomas (actor)David "Dave" Thomas is a Canadian comedian and actor. He was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, but moved to Durham, North Carolina where his father, John E. Thomas, attended Duke University and earned a PhD in Philosophy. Thomas attended George Watts and Moorehead elementary schools...
as Doug McKenzie - Rick MoranisRick MoranisFrederick Allan "Rick" Moranis is a Canadian comedian, actor, musician, and a magician. Moranis came to prominence in the late 1970s on the sketch comedy show Second City Television, and later appeared in several Hollywood films including Strange Brew; Ghostbusters; Spaceballs; Little Shop of...
as Bob McKenzie - Max von SydowMax von SydowMax von Sydow is a Swedish actor. He has also held French citizenship since 2002. He has starred in many films and had supporting roles in dozens more...
as Brewmeister Smith - Lynne GriffinLynne GriffinLynne Griffin is a Canadian actress. She is known for her work in film, television and stage.Griffin was born in Toronto, Ontario, the daughter of Kay, an actress, and James Joseph Griffin, a fashion photographer and soccer player. Currently, she is married to fellow actor Sean Gregory Sullivan.-...
as Pam Elsinore - Angus MacInnesAngus MacInnesAngus MacInnes is a Canadian actor. He is most famous for his role as Gold Leader in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, and as former hockey great Jean "Rosey" LaRose in the comedy Strange Brew...
as Jean "Rosie" LeRose - Paul DooleyPaul Dooley-Personal life:Dooley was born Paul Dooley Brown in Parkersburg, West Virginia, the son of Ruth Irene , a homemaker, and Peter James Brown, a factory worker. Dooley was a cartoonist as a youth and drew a strip for a local paper in Parkersburg. He joined the Navy before discovering acting while at...
as Uncle Claude - Mel BlancMel BlancMelvin Jerome "Mel" Blanc was an American voice actor and comedian. Although he began his nearly six-decade-long career performing in radio commercials, Blanc is best remembered for his work with Warner Bros...
as Voice of Father McKenzie - Tom Harvey as The Inspector
- Douglas Campbell as Henry Green
- Len Doncheff as Jack Hawkland
Production
In 1981, Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas recorded a Bob and Doug McKenzie comedy album which sold a million copies. Based on this success, they thought about parlaying that into a feature film. After fellow SCTV cast member John CandyJohn Candy
John Franklin Candy was a Canadian actor and comedian. He rose to fame as a member of the Toronto branch of The Second City and its related Second City Television series, and through his appearances in comedy films such as Stripes, Splash, Cool Runnings, The Great Outdoors, Spaceballs, and Uncle...
got an offer from Universal Pictures
Universal Pictures
-1920:* White Youth* The Flaming Disc* Am I Dreaming?* The Dragon's Net* The Adorable Savage* Putting It Over* The Line Runners-1921:* The Fire Eater* A Battle of Wits* Dream Girl* The Millionaire...
to do a film called Going Berserk
Going Berserk
Going Berserk is a 1983 comedy film starring John Candy, Joe Flaherty, and Eugene Levy and directed by David Steinberg.- Plot :John Bourgignon is an amiable chauffeur and would-be drummer who is engaged to the daughter of an extremely disapproving United States senator...
, 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. 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.
They hired Steve De Jarnatt
Steve De Jarnatt
Steve De Jarnatt is an American film and television director, screenwriter, and short story author.He is best known for writing and directing the 1988 nuclear apocalypse thriller Miracle Mile and the film Cherry 2000....
to write the first draft. Initially, Thomas told De Jarnatt that he wanted to base the film's story around Hamlet
Hamlet
The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601...
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. 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. 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".
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
Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks is an American film director, screenwriter, composer, lyricist, comedian, actor and producer. He is best known as a creator of broad film farces and comic parodies. He began his career as a stand-up comic and as a writer for the early TV variety show Your Show of Shows...
and Woody Allen
Woody Allen
Woody Allen is an American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, jazz musician, author, and playwright. Allen's films draw heavily on literature, sexuality, philosophy, psychology, Jewish identity, and the history of cinema...
. They were subsequently given a budget of $5 million. Before filming, all of the major breweries wanted the McKenzie brothers to appear in beer advertisements. The filmmakers had the promise of Molson
Molson
Molson-Coors Canada Inc. is the Canadian division of the world's fifth-largest brewing company, the Molson Coors Brewing Company. It is the second oldest company in Canada after the Hudson's Bay Company. Molson's first brewery was located on the St...
'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. The exterior shots of the store (now a Tim Hortons
Tim Hortons
Tim Hortons Inc. is a Canadian fast casual restaurant known for its coffee and doughnuts. It is also Canada's largest fast food service with over 3000 stores nationwide. It was founded in 1964 in Hamilton, Ontario, by Canadian hockey player Tim Horton and Jim Charade, after an initial venture in...
/Pizza Pizza
Pizza Pizza
Pizza Pizza is a Canadian franchise of pizza restaurants mainly located in the province of Ontario. Other locations operate in Quebec, Nova Scotia, in western Canada , and in non-traditional locations such as university campuses and movie theatres throughout Canada...
) were shot in Scarborough, Ontario at the corner of Eglinton Ave and Midland Ave. The KFC
KFC
KFC, founded and also known as Kentucky Fried Chicken, is a chain of fast food restaurants based in Louisville, Kentucky, in the United States. KFC has been a brand and operating segment, termed a concept of Yum! Brands since 1997 when that company was spun off from PepsiCo as Tricon Global...
and Petro-Canada
Petro-Canada
Petro-Canada was a crown corporation of Canada in the field of oil and natural gas. It was headquartered in the Petro-Canada Centre in Calgary, Alberta. In August, 2009, Petro-Canada merged with Suncor Energy, a deal in which Suncor investors received approximately 60 per cent ownership of the...
gas station seen in the background still exist. 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. The emergency vehicles used during filming were all real Metropolitan Toronto Police squad cars. The Ambulances used briefly were on loan from Metropolitan Toronto Ambulance
Toronto EMS
Toronto Emergency Medical Services is the statutory Emergency medical services provider for the city of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The service is operated directly as a branch of the municipal government as an independent, third-service option provider, which means that the service is funded by...
.
Reception
Strange Brew currently holds a 70% approval rating on Rotten TomatoesRotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
, with a 79% rating from users of the site. In her review for The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, Janet Maslin
Janet Maslin
Janet Maslin is an American journalist, best known as a film and literary critic for The New York Times. She served as the Times film critic from 1977–1999.- Biography :...
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". 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". In his review for the Globe and Mail, Jay Scott
Jay Scott
Jay Scott was the pen name of Jeffrey Scott Beaven , a Canadian film critic.Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Scott fled to Canada in 1969 as a draft dodger. He settled in Calgary, and began writing film reviews for the Calgary Albertan a few years later...
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".
In Popular Culture
The track National Movie Review on the alternative hip-hop album Deltron 3030Deltron 3030
Deltron 3030 is an alternative hip hop supergroup composed of producer Dan the Automator, rapper Del the Funky Homosapien and DJ Kid Koala...
, included as part of the album's futuristic dystopian backstory, explains that the vintage movie of the day Strange Brew 'chronicles the heroic adventures of two latter day renaissance men, or, to use the correct 20th century terminology, "hoser
Hoser
Hoser is both a slang term and a stereotype, originating from and used primarily in Canada. It is not often used by Canadians, but it is sometimes used as "typical" Canadian slang by those imitating Canadians, similar to the expression "eh?" The term "hoser" gained popularity from the comedic skits...
s"'. The fictional reviewer awards the film three thumbs up.
External links
- Comparison to Hamlet
- Bob and Doug McKenzie website, pictures, clips, and information