Well, it certainly is strange

Some moves are of a type where you have to have been there at the right time, such as to be able to really get and enjoy the references. Others might be better enjoyed by some ages but not all. A good example of that latter is Strange Brew.

Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, members of the old SCTV troupe, play Bob and Doug McKenzie respectively. They're a pair of stereotypically Canadian brothers who host a cable access show called Great White North (a sketch that was added to the SCTV program to fulfill Canadian content requirements), which seems little more than the McKenzies showing off their stereotypical Canadianness. The McKenzies don't seem to have any other ability in life, and from what their father yells at them haven't ever even been able to hold down a regular job.

Having lost their father's beer money, they concoct a ruse to put a dead mouse in a bottle of their father's favorite beer, Elsinore, to try to get a refund. The beer store isn't having any of it, telling them to go to the brewer to get their refund. When they go to the brewery, it's strangely empty, although their complaint results in their being given jobs watching the production line for bottle contamination. They also meet the heiress who's supposed to be the owner of the brewery, Pam Elsinore (Lynne Griffin).

However, she's having trouble getting what's rightfully hers. Her father died under mysterious circumstances, and Uncle Claude (Paul Dooley) is running the brewery with a paucity of workers. One of the only workers left besides a secretary is the Brewmeister Smith, played rather surprisingly by Max von Sydow who you wonder why the heck he took a role in a movie like this, although he plays it to the hilt which is what the role demands.

The Brewmeister and Claude have a bizarre plan to take over the world by drugging Elsinore beer, which will subject the drinkers to a form of mind control in which playing certain musical tones will control their brains in certain ways. This is, I'd think, overly complicated; just constantly propgandize people as we saw during covid and you can get a lot of them to go for all sorts of bullshit. Pam and the McKenzies figure out that something's going on, but are they going to be able to stop Brewmeister Smith's evil plan?

I think I'm giving the plot of Strange Brew more credit than it deserves with the synopsis above. Instead, Strange Brew is really the sort of movie that was designed to take a couple of popular TV sketch characters and have them do their antics for something that's stretched into a feature-length film. The humor here is mostly juvenile, and whether you like the movie depends on how much you're OK with juvenile humor. Normally, I don't have much of a problem with it. Here, however, for some reason, a lot of the jokes felt like stuff that the writers thought would be funny, but are more in-jokes or something that didn't come off so well. Max von Sydow is the highlight, as, having said above, he goes way over the top playing a ridiculous supervillain in a role that I can't think of him having done anything else remotely like it. Perhaps that's why he took the role.