Of Dreck & Drink: Sudden Death and Boulder Beer Co. Killer Penguin
A guide for those with bad taste in movies and good taste in brews
In every previous month of this column, I’ve invariably started with a movie I wanted to watch and then searched for a thematically appropriate beer to pair with it. This month is the inverse.
As I prepared for a move to the Atlanta area to join the Paste staff full-time, thinning out my fridge contents became a necessity. Packed to the gills with craft beer, my friends were all too happy to help me eliminate 22 oz and 750 ml bottles until only one or two remained that I could conceivably pair with a film. I was left looking at a bottle I’d been saving for a while—a 2013 bomber of Boulder Beer Co.’s Killer Penguin Barleywine. But what does one pair with a beer named “Killer Penguin”?
If you said “something with Jean-Claude Van Damme,” then you’re even better at this than I am. When my research first turned up 1995’s Sudden Death, I didn’t really grasp the connection. Is it just because Van Damme plays a fire marshal in the Pittsburgh Penguins arena? That would be a pretty tenuous connection. But never fear, because the penguin motif pays off big time.
The simplest way of describing Sudden Death is to say “It’s Die Hard in a hockey arena,” because that’s what it is, practically note for note. Van Damme is of course the film’s John McClane, your typical, garden-variety Pittsburgh resident with an inexplicable Belgian accent, playing a disgraced firefighter instead of a police officer. All the other important elements are there: Trapped inside a sealed building; terrorists take over and hold hostages; black cop (FBI agent) is the hero’s voice from the outside over the radio; hero races against time to find and disarm bombs. The entire concept displays an almost admirable contempt for the audience’s ability to remember that this is something they’ve seen rehashed over and over. It sits the viewer down and says “Look, Die Hard was seven years ago, and even though it’s had two of its own sequels since, we think you’ll like our take on it—it has kickboxing, sort of!”
The actual plot is inane and makes little sense, even compared with the film it’s ripping off. The terrorist leader takes the visiting vice president of the United States hostage and demands the release of frozen bank assets that total into the billions. His plan involves blowing up the hockey arena at the end of the game and somehow escaping via helicopter in the chaos, but none of this matters. What matters is KICKBOXING ON PENGUIN ACTION.
I refer to the reason for this pairing, and it’s one of the great, unsung action sequences in bad movie history. His daughter missing and in the clutches of the villains, our Belgian fire chief runs afoul of a potentially deadly adversary—a female assassin disguised as Penguins mascot Iceburgh. In a full-body mascot suit.