Lauren Conrad, a famous reality star, once said, "I want to forgive you, and I want to forget you."
After having survived several incredibly excruciating hours watching "Strange Wilderness," one can more fully understand what she meant. It would be kind to forgive Steve Zahn, Justin Long, Jonah Hill and Harry Hamlin and better to forget this movie ever existed. Steve Zahn was only just proving his incredible acting skills with the gritty, dramatic Werner Herzog film "Rescue Dawn" (2007) this past summer, and now he is running around with a turkey on a certain appendage in the a bumbling stoner flick "Strange Wilderness."
"Strange Wilderness," as the audience learns, was a popular nature show on TV, but after the death of the original host, the ratings declined. Peter Gaulke (played by Steve Zahn) continues his father's legacy, but he has no knowledge of the subject matter. In a voice-over narration, Gaulke says, "Bears derive their name from a football team in Chicago."
"Strange Wilderness" is on the brink of cancellation when an old friend of Gaulke's father offers Gaulke the opportunity to be at the top of the 3 a.m. time slot with a map to Bigfoot's cave.
On the trip, hilarity is supposed to ensue. Disappointingly, a man getting thrashed around by a shark while wearing a seal costume is not nearly as funny to watch as it sounds. Over the course of the movie, teeth are knocked out, money is lost, drugs are consumed and a turkey performs fellatio.
The film goes from incident to incident thinking that this is equivalent to an actual plot structure. The quest for Bigfoot ultimately takes the crew to Ecuador, which looks remarkably like a dry Southern California desert.
The rag tag crew includes a soundman, Fred Wolf (played by Allen Covert), an assistant named Cooker (Jonah Hill), a driver named Danny Guiterrez (Peter Dante), a travel agent named Cheryl (Ashley Scott), an animal handler named Whitaker (Kevin Heffernan) and a stoner cameraman named Junior (Justin Long).
Apple must not be paying Justin Long well enough for his "Mac Guy" ads. Actually, those ads are more entertaining in 30 seconds then this whole movie was in 87 minutes.
While the cast is full of familiar names from the sidelines of other comedies, not one of them can manage to take the awful script and make it remotely funny.
Coming off the success of "Superbad" (2007), Hill has one of the film's most disappointing performances. His character seems to serve no purpose, speaks with a terrible Southern accent for no discernable reason, and has a running gag of using a joy buzzer. A joy buzzer does not receive many laughs in real life, and it definitely does not help to save a floundering comedy.
The characters are all hollow and lifeless. Since character development and plot are of little importance to the writers of this film, they must achieve all of their laughs on stupid noises, vomiting and homophobic or racist remarks. Vomiting into a shark's mouth, for example, is pretty strange - but not really that funny.
The only explanation for a movie like this to be produced and sent to theaters nationwide is that producers were worried about the looming writers' strike and were willing to make any piece of junk into a cheap movie with even cheaper laughs.
Paramount distributed this film but chose to take its name off of the beginning credits. Director Fred Wolf and writer Peter Gaulke, on the other hand, were so proud of their film that they named the two main characters after themselves.
People would only find this film funny with some sort of herbal help. And even then, a marathon of actual nature shows would probably prove to be more entertaining.
