Strange Wilderness

Review By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

An actor having their own production company can prove to be beneficial. In the fairly crowded world of Hollywood, it allows an actor’s success and influence to pick film projects that are otherwise overlooked by the regular studios.

However, an actor’s interest in a particular project may not always turn out to be such a good idea. In the case of comedy box-office king Adam Sandler, this is proven in spades with the green-lighting of the abysmal Steve Zahn film Strange Wilderness, now available on DVD.

The once-reputable TV nature show "Strange Wilderness" has been in decline since Peter Gaulke (Steven Zahn) succeeded it from his father as host. He has done it by infusing the narration with his own brand of crude humor.

His TV station, who has now bumped the TV program from prime time to late at night, orders Peter to make the show better quickly or he will be replaced by rival Sky Pierson (Harry Hamlin). All seems lost until a family friend offers to sell him a map to a cave, where the legendary Bigfoot is said to reside.

Believing that he may have found a lucrative chance to save his career, Peter travels down to South America with a rag tag crew including soundman Fred Wolf (Allen Covert), production assistant Cooker (Jonah Hill), driver Danny Guiterrez (Peter Dante), assistant, Cheryl (Ashley Scott), animal handler Whitaker (Kevin Hefferman) and stoner Junior (Justin Long) to find the creature. However, finding the creature will not be easy as they must often tangle with wildlife both animal and human.

Strange Wilderness surprisingly emerges as less than the sum of its parts. Despite having a fairly good enough set up and a good cast, even withstanding Sandler stalwarts like Allen Covert and Peter Dante, the film is filled from beginning to end with nothing but jokes that never stick, enormously crude humor, and a rather pedestrian direction from writer/director Fred Wolf.

The DVD’s picture quality is in the 2:35:1 anamorphic widescreen aspect ratio, with the sound quality in Dolby Digital Surround 5.1. The DVD is also packed with plenty of special features.

The first are thirteen fairly forgettable deleted scenes. The second is an edition of the syndicated behind-the-scenes program Reel Comedy, which shows fairly comical behind-the-scenes interviews with the film’s cast.

The next is a fairly pointless behind-the-scenes featurette called “What Do We Do”, followed by footage of Jonah Hill performing the song in the film in the featurette “Cooker’s Song”. Rounding out the special features is the featurette “The Turkey”, which features behind-the-scenes footage of the film’s fairly grossest and most infamous scene.

All in all, even with Adam Sandler’s rather dubious stamp of approval, Strange Wilderness is nothing but a tepid comedy that has the life sucked out of it by fairly lazy and pedestrian direction filled with gross-out humor and stupidity running amok from end to end. The end result is ultimately a shockingly abysmal affair.

Movie Grade: F
DVD Features Grade: ...