After watching Strange Wilderness, you may want to soak your feet in a tub of live piranhas, just for a few laughs.
There was a day when "Wild Kingdom" and a few PBS specials had the animal angle covered on TV. Then came cable and things like The National Geographic Channel, The Nature Channel, The Science Channel, The History Channel, The Learning Channel, Discovery, Animal Planet, and the rest. So, you'd think there would be no time like the present for a good parody of all these wildlife-adventure shows. The key word here is "good."
Unfortunately, "Strange Wilderness," the 2008 comedy from Happy Madison Productions ("I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry," "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo," "Anger Management," "The Hot Chick," "Little Nicky," etc.) is anything but good. It's miles from good. It's in a different solar system from good.
To be fair, though, the movie has one bright spot: It's only eight-four minutes long.
The main character, Peter Gaulke (Steve Zahn), tells the story in flashback. Pete's a stoner whose father used to host a TV wildlife show called "Strange Wilderness." Now that his father has passed on, Peter has inherited the show, and because he's a total idiot, he's run it into the ground. Neither he nor his head writer, Fred Wolf (Allen Covert), nor anybody else connected with the show knows one iota about wildlife. The result is that the ratings have fallen through the floor, and the network has scheduled the program for three in the morning. If they can't find something really big to increase their audience, the network will cancel the show.
Now, here's the only interesting thing about the movie: Peter Gaulke and Fred Wolf are the real names of the two guys who wrote and directed it. I guess they were pretty confident about the film to put their own names in it. Personally, I'd feel embarrassed to have my name associated with this nonsense, but these guys are all brass. It's Wolf's first time as a director, and it looks like it, but Gaulke has written some fairly decent things in the past like "Ice Age: The Meltdown," "Black Knight," and "Say It Isn't So." This one, however, he may regret.
Anyway, the big new idea that the fictional Peter and Fred come up with is to film a Bigfoot in the wild. It seems that one of Pete's dad's old friends, Bill Calhoun (Joe Don Baker), has taken a picture of a Bigfoot and has a map to the location of the creature's den in Ecuador. So, Peter, Fred, and their crew head off to South America to find and film the beast. And that's it. They all act like morons on the trip, do nonstop stupid things, and the movie ends. Thankfully.
Apparently seeing the script was of no use to anyone, the filmmakers decided to juice up the proceedings with some guest stars. I mentioned Joe Don Baker, who comes and goes in a flash. There are also Ernest Borgnine as their cameraman, the actor smart enough to appear only in the first few minutes and at the very end; Harry Hamlin as a rival wildlife show host also trying to film the elusive Bigfoot; Jason Long as a pot-headed assistant cameraman; Jonah Hill as a general handyman; Peter Dante as a foul-mouthed driver; Kevin Heffernan as an animal handler who has never been around an animal before; and, best of all, Robert Patrick, who steals the show as a macho tracker. Thank heaven for Patrick, who plays it so straight he's the only genuinely funny character in the movie.
Oh, and for sex appeal, there's Ashley Scott as a travel agent who somehow comes along for the ride. She's nice to look at.
Still and all, the characters are ciphers--without wit, without meaning, without soul. This might be all right in the supporting players who have little screen time, but even the leads played by Zahn and Covert are without personality. After spending nearly an hour and a half with these guys, we still don't know them as anything more than indistinguishable nonentities; they might just as well be strangers on a bus. They're telephone poles. Nevertheless, Patrick creates a memorable character in less than two minutes. Now, you might say, yeah, but Patrick's a real actor and we expect that. While that's true, it doesn't explain the flatness of the characters portrayed by Borgnine, Long, Baker, and Hill, who have shown exceptional work in the past. The fact is, these actors get nothing to work with here, and one assumes little or no direction. As a result, they are simply people reading lines, characters without character.
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