Author: Daniel Spinali

The American movie machine has had far too much control over this column. How ‘bout some Canadiana, eh?

Bob and Doug McKenzie are losers. There is no doubt about that. Their idea of a good day is to sit around and drink beer, cook back bacon and smoke, on top of perpetually calling each other names.

Having spent their dad’s beer money (not on beer, of course) the brothers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They just drank the last three beers in the house (they gave the third to their dog Hosehead) and are charged by their dad to get him a fresh case of Elsinore beer. They come up with the plan of stuffing a mouse into a beer bottle in order to get a free case from the beer store.

Their plan begins to fall apart the second they reach the counter at the beer store. The clerk refuses to give them free beer and insists that they take up their complaint with the brewery. When they arrive at the brewery, they manage to save the daughter of the recently deceased owner, Pam Elsinore, from injury when her car becomes stuck in the electrified front gate. Once inside the brewery, they find out that since the owner’s death, the brewmaster, known as Brewmaster Smith, and Pam’s uncle, Claude Elsinore, have fired virtually all the employees in an effort to automate the entire brewery. Irritated by this fact (and by the mouse in the bottle) Pam hires Bob and Doug to work in quality control on the bottling line.

While at work, the brothers encounter Jean “Rosie” LeRose, a former hockey player who had a career-ending nervous breakdown and ended up working at the brewery. He, like many others, has fallen under the control of Brewmaster Smith, who in reality is a doctor at the Royal Canadian Institute for the Mentally Insane. Using his knowledge of drugs, Smith concocts a beer with a mind control serum that makes people react to certain sounds. His plan is to release the beer to the unsuspecting public at the annual Oktoberfest celebrations in Kitchener, Ont. It’s a first step towards eventual world domination.

This movie is, without a doubt, as Canadian as Canadian can be. It takes place in Ontario, the main characters always have toques on, beer is a major plot device and every sentence ends with “eh?” or “hoser.”

Is there a problem with that? I don’t think so, eh!

Strange Brew

Directed by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, 1983

Starring Rick Moranis, Dave Thomas and Max von Sydow

Everyone I know has a guilty pleasure of some kind. For some, it’s a certain kind of book and to others, it’s a certain kind of food. For most of my friends, it’s a movie or actor. No matter how bad the actor is or how many times they have seen the movie, they will never turn away from them. In my case, that actor is Pauly Shore and the movie is Encino Man.

A young Sean Astin stars as Dave Morgan, a high school “loser” in Encino, Calif. His one goal in life is to finish digging a hole in his backyard to make a pool for an epic post-prom party that will theoretically make him the most popular kid in school. While he is digging with his friend Stanley “Stoney” Brown (Pauly Shore) in his backyard pool-hole, he finds a prehistoric bowl, which leads to a large chunk of ice. They start to excavate the ice, and within it they see a man, who they decide to thaw out.

When the boys return from school, they check the garage, but find that the caveman is missing. They begin to think that they have lost all chance of becoming popular at school until they discover handprints on the windows of the house. As it turns out, the caveman has defrosted and is very much alive. They clean him up and give him the name Link, short for Linkavich Chomofsky, and the backstory of being a foreign exchange student from Estonia, so that they can enrol him in school and use him in their plan to become cool.

They bring him to school and Link becomes the talk of the town. Dave and Stoney still think that he is their ticket to fame and popularity, yet after only one day at school, Link has received multiple offers for dates, become a member of the computer club and befriended virtually everyone in the school. At the same time, Dave and Stoney are still referred to as the dork squad and people wonder why in the world Link would hang out with two losers like them.

This movie is the perfect example of early ‘90s teen comedy that was, of course, universally panned by almost every adult who saw it. Regardless of that fact, I think that everyone should watch this movie once, at least to have an awesome ‘90s flashback.

Encino Man
Directed by Les Mayfield, 1992
Starring Pauly Shore, Sean Astin and Brendan Fraser