Successful stand-up comedian Bert Kreischer — whose crazy seven years of college at Florida State University inspired the 2002 comedy National Lampoon’s Van Wilder — has just mined his foggy formative years for another big-screen project.
The Machine will have Mark Hamill playing his father, who gets kidnapped by Russian gangsters after Kreischer’s character gets accidentally mixed up with the Russian mob.
The film, which The Hollywood Reporter describes as “Midnight Run meets The Hangover” is based on Kreischer’s autobiographical stand-up routine.
As a student, he was more into partying than studying, so much so that it took him three classes to realize he’d signed up for a Russian language class instead of Spanish.
Saved from flunking out by an instructor who needed a minimum number of students to get her master’s degree credits for teaching it, Kreischer found himself on a study trip to Mother Russia in its 1990s gangster heyday.
Long story short, armed with only a sentence worth of semi-usable Russian, and a bunch of booze, he ended up befriending a room full of gangsters.
Kreischer’s shirtless stand-up retelling of the story, titled “The Machine” — a moniker he accidentally gave himself to his comrades — has been seen more than 37 million times on YouTube.
Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
