Strange Wilderness

I have read a lot of negative reviews about this movie. I'd have to say that they are 100% correct. I have also read some reviews by people who absolutely loved it. They are also 100% correct. I tend to be more toward the second group, but I can definitely see both sides.

The plot makes no sense. The dialogue is at times very bad. However (a very big however), I think that this movie knows its audience and delivers to them a light-hearted "stoner" movie with some very funny moments (the shark voice-overs, for example). This is a Happy Madison movie. Yes, times have changed from Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore (two of the originals, no doubt). However, I think that many people go into these types of movies expecting something more "mainstream," such as Wedding Crashers or 40-Year-Old Virgin. The sure absurdity of the movie was enough for me. Much of the dialogue, albeit very goofy, has a certain improv feel to it, letting the actors play with the scenes.

To end this long "review," think of movies like Beerfest, Super Troopers, Grandma's Boy for a quick comparison. Does this movie win any awards? Absolutely not. Is it probably better on DVD? Perhaps. However, if these laugh-aloud "stoner" movies are your thing, then I think you'll enjoy this movie.

This movie extremely disappointed me! I remember watching the trailer months prior to its release, so I was pretty excited for it. I really enjoy most of the Happy Madison films, but this one was a complete bummer! I love Jonah Hill and Steve Zahn is just as good. Not to mention the cast of characters that usually appear in these films, specifically Allen Covert of Grandma's Boy. I really loved that movie, so I then put faith that this one would be somewhat comparable, but quite the contrary. I mean there was some funny and sometimes hilarious parts, but it was just a stretch. They tried way too hard for laughs and some of the time they did succeed, but fell short quite numerously! Jonah Hill's character got few lines, but when he did, they were fairly funny. I did enjoy Justin Long as he is coming into his own as an actor. Kevin Heffernan didn't get nearly enough funny lines or the proper camera time he deserved, I mean he's Farva for the love of god, the man is funny. With all this being said, wait for the DVD. Poor plot, great actors, but wrongly used their talents! Severely disappointed in this film.....I even went opening night I was so excited.....stupid film.....not even a stoner flick at best and trust me I love stoner flicks!

There is only one plot line I can extract from my experience watching Strange Wilderness. It is mildly about a wilderness animal TV show hosted by a guy named Peter Gaulke (Steve Zahn). He and his demented crew (Allen Covert, Jonah Hill, Ashley Scott, Justin Long e.t.c.) find out that the ratings for their 3 A.M. show have dropped drastically. They have two weeks before their show gets the boot, and they have to find a way to keep it on the air. Peter's friend Milas (Ernest Borgnine...Making a quick cha-ching) suggests he knows where Bigfoot lives within the Andes wild, so the team decides to track the mysterious creature as a last hope to save the show. While on the road they run into one ludicrous obstacle after another, but keep going anyway. That really just about wraps it up in the "plot" department.

Strange Wilderness is an awful film in reality. The plot is thinner than a microscopic germ, the acting is either drug-induced or just absolutely atrocious with no real effort (I'm leaning towards drug-induced). The film itself is tastelessly shot in any possible way. They were in the wilderness for 90% of the film, they could have thrown in at least a few nice artsy shots of trees or something, but I guess that was a no-no. And don't even get me started on the continuity because there is virtually no continuity to critique. What other negative things can I say about Strange Wilderness. Oh that's right, how in the world could I forget this big detail, the filmmakers sure did. Strange Wilderness does not seem to have a script. Instead the actors seem to sit around after being told a basic outline of what to talk about. Then they just ad-lib away until the scene is over, and most of that screen time they don't follow that basic outline in any way imaginable. If there was any sort of script to this movie, I'm guessing Jack Daniels or Captain Morgan wrote it. Who knows maybe somebody dropped a lit joint on the screenplay and it went up in flames, and everyone around was too high to do a rewrite.

But Strange Wilderness was funny at times, there I said it. Despite all the horrendous effort that went into making this flimsy far-below-low-brow comedy, it was the actors having "high" and mighty fun that made the film watchable. Justin Long for instance is at his worst here as a one dimensional stoner, but he still manages to give us a few chuckles just because of how random and stupid he is acting on screen. There is one funny scene in which he has tattooed eyes on his eyelids, and the team wakes him up from sleeping and he scares all of them. Although the tattoos were magically gone in the next scene, I guess Justin Long must have found them in a box of cracker jacks and suggested it as a gag. Steve Zahn is a very talented actor with movies like Joy Ride, Rescue Dawn, and even You've Got Mail. But in Strange Wilderness he too is at his seemingly deliberate worst. As the host of a wilderness TV show his character Peter is bad, as is the show where you can actually hear Steve Zahn stutter and pause as he thinks of what to say next. The half-assed ad-libbing is hilarious. I've never seen a movie with as little effort as Strange Wilderness, and because everyone involved doesn't try to hide that fact we can actually laugh at the film.

Steve Zahn, Justin Long, Jonah Hill, and even Ernest Borgnine were most likely all stoned in the making of this movie. This movie was probably shot for their own amusement and then somehow made its way into movie theaters. I don't know how they got that accomplished, but I guess the Happy Madison crew have their ways. The movie is very bad but I would prefer it any day of the week before I ever watched dreck like Epic Movie or Meet the Spartans again. At least this movie had a few fine actors having a stoned good time. In the end I give Strange Wilderness a 1.5 out of 4 because it is an awful film. But for a one time viewing it was a little amusing in a half-assed way.

One of the reasons why I decided to watch this, is because I needed a comedy to laugh at, if it's not possible to laugh together with it. The DVD is already available at the shops, but I don't think I'm ready to fork out a Code 1 DVD price for what's essentially a short comedic film which is based from a Saturday Night Life comedy skit. Written by the same creative team of Peter Gaulke and Fred Wolf with the latter taking on directorial duties as well, Strange Wilderness delivered some genuine laughs, but only if you're tolerant of being insensitive to the kind of subject the film makes fun of.

Strange Wilderness is a long running wildlife programme which is now succeeded by Peter (Steve Zahn), the host of the show, whose father had made the programme into one of the best loved prime time shows. Under Peter's leadership, ratings have plummeted, and needless to say even their 3am timeslot is in danger of being canceled. In a last minute desperation for survival, he and his crew have to look for a new way to ensure their programme continues, and dropped at their laps is the opportunity to follow up on a solid lead to the whereabouts of Bigfoot.

Eseentially this movie is one big road trip that tells of the crew's journey to documentary history, with the likes of soundman and co-collaborator Fred (Allen Covert), Cooker (Jonah Hill), the only female in the team Cheryl (Ashley Scott), and cameraman Junior (Justin Long), amongst others. And throughout the movie, we see each and everyone of them getting into enough funny scenarios that made this film look like many pieces of skits being glued together, with laughs coming courtesy of sexual innuendos (you just got to hand it to the turkey), sight gags, slapstick and just plain buffoony. In fact, I even suspect that everyone in the cast were on a high as they shot this, as dialogues were laced quite incoherently with plenty of ad-libbing, especially Justin Long, though of course if he's really acting, then kudos to him for being stoned all the time.

While giving no respect to wildlife, the funniest moments were reserved for their voice overs of Nature, and it's really quite incredible should anything like it be actually aired for television. They are intentionally full of factual errors, lapse into unnecessary judgmental and slanted viewpoints, but always just plain ridiculously funny. Perhaps I was in crap mode, but the humor here doesn't apologize for any offence made, since after all, the subject matter can't fight back anyway. I know I'm shallow if I say I really couldn't get enough of the film poking fun at the physical features/defects repeatedly. There is no plot in the movie, besides everyone being perpetually broke as they try and scrimp or come out with more hare-brained ideas to fund their movie and fuel the laughs.

So the bottomline is, don't expect any genius from Strange Wilderness, but if you're in for some low-brow humor, then this movie might just be the perfect laughing medicine for anyone wanting to chase the blues away, without any medicinal assistance.

"Strange Wilderness" is a good-natured, frequently hilarious takeoff on all those nature documentaries that play on the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, and whose pedigree stretches all the way back to the granddaddy of them all, "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom." Peter and Fred are the producers of a wildlife series entitled "Strange Wilderness" that has been foundering in the ratings ever since Peter's father, a Steve Irwin-type naturist and the original host of the show, passed away, leaving his less-than-stellar son to carry on his legacy. The sheer scientific illiteracy of much of the commentary that Peter provides for his footage probably hasn't helped matters much in this regard. Now faced with the prospect of series cancellation, Peter and his crew of incompetent dweebs head off to the wilds of South America to file an exclusive report on the famed Bigfoot who has recently been spotted there.

Though adolescent in the extreme, "Strange Wilderness" turns out to be a zany, endearingly random and unflaggingly energetic little comedy whose likable cast is obviously dialed into what the movie makers are trying to do here. Steve Zahn, Allen Covert, Covert, Ernest Borgnine, Jeff Garlin, Kevin Heffernan, Justin Long and Harry Hamlin seem to be having the time of their lives here and their enjoyment rubs off on us as well.

Is it dumb? Of course it is. Is it lowbrow, inane and hopelessly juvenile? You betcha'. But unlike so many other films that fall into those categories, "Strange Wilderness" has a shrewd mind for parody and a liveliness of spirit that actually make the movie funny. Credit scenarist Peter Gaulke and co-author/director Fred Wolf (who first developed this concept as sketches on "Saturday Night Live") for some excellent joke-writing and pacing and for their willingness to pull out all the stops in their effort to get the laugh. In fact, the crew's ill-fated encounter with Bigfoot is alone worth the price of admission.