| | | They Could Solve Nature's Biggest Mystery if They Only Had a Clue.
Features: DVD
From Happy Madison Productions comes a comedy with bite. In order to save his wildlife TV show from being cancelled, dim-witted host Peter Gaulke (Steve Zahn) and his half-baked crew of misfits have one last chance to turn the ratings around. Desperate to stay on the air, Peter hatches a plan to track down the most elusive beast on Earth -- Bigfoot. But when killer pygmies, frisky border guards and an amorous turkey threaten to cut their expedition short, the crew of Strange Wilderness will soon discover that nature is one bad mother.
"...[like] an old John Candy-Dan Aykroyd movie with bongs and more swearing." Michael Rechtshaffen, The Hollywood Reporter
"...an amazingly crass and chaotic stoner comedy, from which I emerged cheerfully giggling..." Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Editor's Note
From the production team that brought you HAPPY GILMORE and BILLY MADISON comes this amiable, foul-mouthed "nature" comedy. Steve Zahn--sporting his best burned-out surfer dude drawl--leads a ragtag crew of wasted nature documentarians deep into the Ecuadorian forest on a quest for the legendary Bigfoot. Constantly being rousted for their drunken ineptitude and ill-informed voiceover narrations, the boys need a break to boost their ratings and Bigfoot might be it; all they have to do is remember to load the camera and not get eaten (especially by a certain turkey). Allen Covert, SUPERBAD's Jonah Hill, Justin Long, and Kevin Heffernan are the crew. Harry Hamlin is a rival bigfoot tracker. Ashley Scott (INTO THE BLUE) provides the ubiquitous foxy babe interest. Ernest Borgnine, Robert Patrick, and Joe Don Baker show up in bit parts. A sort of low-rent LIFE AQUATIC, WILDERNESS is such a fall-down farce that viewers might forget they're not cracking jokes while watching ANIMAL PLANET with their cronies instead of seeing a real movie, but maybe that's a good thing. Former SNL scribe Fred Wolf (JOE DIRT) directs, keeping it as ramshackle and rough around the edges as the law will allow. STRANGE WILDERNESS may not be pretty, but it earns a load of laughs through its sheer mullet-headed recklessness.
| Features | Audio: English, French, Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound | | Deleted Scenes | | Dubbed: French, Spanish | | Featurettes: Cooker's Song, The Turkey, What Do We Do?, & Reel Comedy - Strange Wilderness | | Interactive Menus | | Scene Selection | | Subtitles: English, French, Spanish |
| Entertainment Reviews
 | Strange Wilderness - DVD Review By: Christopher Null - filmcritic.com DVD Reviews Published on: 4/3/2009 5:36 PM | |
Take the second-tier crew from both Adam Sandler's posse (Allen Covert, Peter Dante) and Judd Apatow's regulars (Jonah Hill, Justin Long) and throw them together in a comedic spin on a Wild Kingdom type set and what do you get? A few chuckles rolled in with a lot of gross-out humor. Steve Zahn headlines the directorial debut of Joe Dirt screenwriter Fred Wolf, playing Peter Gaulke, the stoner son of a famous Crocodile Hunter-like dad whose show Strange Wilderness was once a mega-hit. After dad died and Peter took over, things went downhill, with Peter turning in episodes punctuated by absurd narration and questionable nature....read the full review |
| Technical Info
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Release Information
| | Studio: Paramount |
| Release Date: 8/19/2008 |
| Running Time: 87 minutes |
| Original Release Date: 2008 | | Catalog ID: 351884 | | UPC: 00097363518846 | | Number of Discs: 1 |
Audio & Video
| | Original Language: English | | Available Audio Tracks: English | | Video: Color |
Aspect Ratio | | Anamorphic Widescreen 2.35:1 |
| Cast & Crew
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| | Professional Reviews | The Village Voice 5 of 10
Last and quite unforgettably seen as one of Rescue Dawn's tragic POWs, Steve Zahn returns to the jungle to headline this innocuously awful, February-dumped comedy in his trusty but musty persona of the happy-go-unlucky, half-stoned schemer. On a South American search for Bigfoot as a last-ditch effort to save their failing TV wildlife program, host Zahn and his even more incompetent crew--a who's who of slumming talent that includes Jonah Hill, Justin Long, Broken Lizard's Kevin Heffernan, and Ernest Borgnine(!)--smoke dope, joy-buzz each other's crotches, and wag their tongues at every skinny blonde or fake teat that passes their fratty gaze. Why former SNL writers Fred Wolf (who also directs) and Peter Gaulke would force such proven improvisers to stick to such drooling playground idiocy is a mystery not worth solving, as it concerns a script that smugly tries to squeeze a dozen rapid-fire punch lines out of a guy named Dick. (Alternatively, how can you screw up MST3K-style voice-overs of old nature-show footage with this cast?) No snob to low-brow ridiculousness when it's actually unexpected, I'll admit to being amused exactly once, when Zahn gets deep-throated by a gigantic prop turkey who, despite the mouthful, keeps on flapping. - Aaron Hillis
The Onion A.V. Club 5 of 10
Sloppy, choppy, and indifferently assembled, Strange Wilderness is slapdash even by the relaxed standards of its executive producer, Adam Sandler. But thanks to the unbridled verve of the cast--which also includes ringers like Joe Don Baker, Robert Patrick, and 91-year-old Ernest Borgnine, who seems a little too comfortable making bong jokes--it's also just funny enough to make viewers wish it were a whole lot better. Written and directed by Saturday Night Live vets Fred Wolf and Peter Gaulke, Strange Wilderness has three bad comic ideas for every good joke, and it botches many of those, too, thanks to slack comic timing and a nonexistent grasp of storytelling basics. But just when the flop-sweat stench is about to become unbearable, Strange Wilderness stumbles upon an uproarious, laugh-out moment, and suddenly it's tolerable again for another few minutes...Playing the Sandler-esque man-child who learns to accept adult responsibility in order to meet a preposterous challenge, Zahn must save the wildlife television show he has run into the ground after taking it over two years prior from his late father. After network head Jeff Garlin gives him just two weeks to rescue the program from cancellation, Zahn comes across a map that will lead him to Bigfoot...With the possible exception of monkeys, there's no funnier creature on the planet than Sasquatch. But a potentially good gag is wasted by a clumsily executed payoff that's neither humorous nor remotely logical. Such is the case with Wolf's direction throughout Strange Wilderness, which squanders not just the impressive cast, but his and Gaulke's script. Only when Wolf stays out of the way of outsized personalities like Zahn and Hill does Strange Wilderness threaten to become the goofy little laugh-fest a more sure-footed director could have made. - Steven Hyden
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