Strange Wilderness: Not Strange, Just Terrible

Stefani Rubino, Staff Writer

Issue date: 2/26/08 Section: Variety

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Spring hasn't even arrived, and yet it already seems as though Hollywood has hit a serious filmmaking slump. Their latest embarrassment comes in the form of a stoner-comedy called Strange Wilderness, which was produced by Adam Sandler's Happy Madison Productions. However, unlike other "stoner-classics," such as Half Baked and Dazed and Confused, Strange Wilderness is missing one seriously important element: the comedy!
The story begins with the death of the host of television's most beloved animal-show, "Strange Wilderness," and the subsequent impact it has upon his son, Peter Gaulke (Steve Zahn), who is suddenly thrust into the limelight and left to pick up the pieces. Peter encourages his friend and partner Fred Wolf (Allen Covert), to help him run the show. Yet, because the two idiots barely know a pigeon from a flamingo, the ratings sink to all time lows. Refusing to lose the show and disappoint his family, Peter concocts a scheme to try to win back his audience. He decides to go out and search for the only creature that no one has ever really seen before: Bigfoot. However, as soon as Peter and his band of bumbling idiots arrive in Central America to begin shooting, they run into several disasters that they had not expected to face.
The premise of the movie sounds fairly decent and quite possibly, with a lot more work, could have been a very satisfactory film. It has been advertised as a hilarious, slapstick comedy, supposedly in the realm of films like Happy Gilmore and The Wedding Singer, but Strange Wilderness ultimately fails to be an even passable film, unlike the former two. This film was packed with slapstick but lacking in comedy. It's not even funny enough to entertain the teenage boys whom it was originally designed for in the first place .
The biggest victim here has to be Steve Zahn (Bandidas, Rescue Dawn). He is generally never offered any leading roles and the ones that he does manage to land are roles in some of the worst films that I have ever seen. You really can't help but love him in every other film he's been in and he's usually extremely funny. Strange Wilderness however, was doomed from the minute the script was printed, and he was unfortunately trapped on a sinking ship. Although his performance is the most bearable one in the film, he had absolutely no opportunity to flourish here and his career is going to suffer as a result.
Other disappointments would have to be Jonah Hill (SuperBad, Knocked Up) and Justin Long (Accepted, Live Free or Die Hard), who both showed so much promise after their other recent flicks. In Strange Wilderness, they play the dumbest of the bunch and they don't play it all that well. Both Long and Hill are masters of snappy, witty one-liners, but their talents were barely used in this film. Here, they play complete idiots, like the rest of the minor characters, and much like Zahn, also don't get the chance to expand their talents. The movie suffered because of it.
The most unfortunate part about all of this however, is the fact that people actually spent their hard-earned money to go and watch this film. It is just a disaster and as I have already noted, was doomed as soon as the script was printed and handed to the executives at Happy Madison. Hopefully they'll be able to redeem themselves sometime, before it's too late.

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