You have not heard of this movie. Admit it. Not at all right? Course not. No one has, not really. Unless you follow the bizarre creature that is the Internet Celebrity.

Tucker Max is incredibly well known in the www because of his lurid [and true] tales of excessive drinking and infinite capacity to make a cunt of himself in any given situation. His website [TuckerMax.com] contains detailed accounts of his exploits, including when a former Miss Vermont tried to sue him for telling a story which involved him, her and some anal sex gone messily awry. He took his stories off into the form of a book, which was quite popular, and regularly tours American colleges talking about himself and his life. Good job if you can get hold of it. Being in essence a professional dick-head, Tucker Max has caught the attention of a good deal of people. Internet people, but people still, and one of them thought it might be a good idea to turn his book into a movie. And so they did.

Named after his book, I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell is the story of Tucker Max [played in the movie by Matt Czuchry] and his two friends Drew and Dan. It’s Dan’s Stag Night [or Bachelor Party in American, since they seem to have to explain what everything is as plainly as possible when naming it] and Tucker convinces everyone to drive miles out of their way to go to a wicked strip club. Dan is forced to lie to his fiancée about the trip and Drew has just been dumped by his girlfriend in favour of a fat white rapper called Grillionnaire [because he has diamonds on his teeth] so he doesn’t even want to leave his house at all. Long story short, they go out, trouble is caused and Tucker is uninvited to the wedding as Dan gets a proper cob on with him.

Simple stuff really. Having read all of the stories of Tucker Max at one time or another I was watching the movie knowing full well that every single thing that occurs in its duration is true. They may not have happened in that order or with those people, but they all happened and they all happened to Tucker Max [or, more accurately, because of him], which adds a nice extra layer of enjoyment. As it stands on its own, the flick would be similar to The Hangover if it hadn’t spent its time trying to be funny [and mostly succeeding I hasten to add] but had instead occupied itself with being grimy and more realistic. This is by no means a slight on The Hangover, which I enjoyed and wouldn’t rate against this film, but rather something for you to gauge it by. I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell isn’t especially funny [although there are very funny lines in it and it’s way more quotable than The Hangover] but the escalating problems of the trio ring truer. You are never going to find a naked Chinese man in the boot of your car on a stag do, but you may very well get knocked out and throw up on yourself. IHTSBIH, then, is more relatable to men, certainly. Tucker Max as a character, and probably as a person, is an over-exaggerated cartoon character of a bell-end, but Matt Czurchry never lets you hate him. If you met him, you’d like him, but you wouldn’t be able to explain why.

I also enjoyed how they didn’t paint Dan’s fiancée as the typical soul destroying banshee who wants to vampire all the fun of their potential husband and cuckold him for eternity. They bicker and fight, sure, but they’re also shown just hanging out and getting along like two people in love would, which is refreshingly real. I suppose the whole film is really. Drew can be a little one note in his sardonic misanthropy, but when he goes through his character arc it’s not jarring and is done very subtly and within context. Tucker himself comes across as genuinely unaware of how much of a dick he is, but naturally charming and likeable never the less, without him feeling like an ageing Zach Morris or anything. The ending is sweet but not so much so that you get type 2 diabetes and the whole affair is conducted without once wavering from the established personalities of the three main characters. Which is rare.

There’s not a chance in hell you’ll be able to find this movie on DVD. Not in England anyways, but if you do it’s worth a punt, if not just for the Traci Lords cameo and the line “I’m gonna nail you so hard whoever pulls me out of you is gonna become the King of England”.