From the Happy Madison factory of Adam Sandler comes a new comedy, which may or may not be a funny movie worth seeing if you have an hour and a half to kill. The product of Sandler’s output can go one of two ways: stupid but funny (Mr Deeds) or stupid and offensively unfunny (I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry). The thing I’ve discovered is that it’s a really thin line, and you never know which end the dice is going to roll up on. While Sandler didn’t have an direct creative influence on Strange Wilderness, he is credited as a producer, so it’s be a hard case to make to say that he had none at all. What does that mean?
Well, the film itself is about a local wildlife show called… well, you know. It’s hosted by Peter Gaulke (Steve Zahn) who’s replaced his dead father on the long running program. Ratings are down for Pete and “Strange Wilderness”, they can’t even win the competitive 3 am timeslot and the station is looking at Sky Pierson (Harry Hamlin) as a more suitable nature show replacement. Desperate for a big win, an old friend named Bill Calhoun (Joe Don Baker) promises to sell Peter a map to the location of Bigfoot in South America. Packing up his crew, Pete heads south for a road trip to find Bigfoot, save “Strange Wilderness” and punch out Sky Pierson to restore Bill’s honour (it’s a thing).
The movie Strange Wilderness saves itself by not kidding pretending that it’s anything more than what it is: a stoner comedy for the stoner crowd and like-minded idiots who just want to laugh at stupid guys doing stupid things. The crew is made up of the usual cookie cutter gang: the wise old elder (Ernest Borgnine), the doofus (Jonah Hill), the slacker (Kevin Heffernan), the toke boy (Justin Long), the best bud (Allen Covert) and the hot chick (Ashley Scott). With the help of hit and run artists like Hamlin, Jeff Garlin, Blake Clark and Robert Patrick, the cast manages to work well together, their timing pretty much in sync. I’d go so far as to say that without these actors in these roles, the movie would have been a disaster.
Be warned though, Strange Wilderness is the type of movie that traffics in broad stereotypes, endless jokes in regards to the poe-teed set and jokes that may sometimes go on longer then they should – like the seemingly endless barrage of one-liners that riff on the name “Dick”. So yeah, pretty typical, but what sets in apart from the pack is that this cast with this material made me laugh, whether it was making fun of the teeth on a particular shark (repeatedly) or juxtaposing footage of a protestor on fire with a song about Jesus. Silly, goofy, loony, stupid; Strange Wilderness is all those things. If its ambitions were any loftier than that this thing would have been a real failure.
