Surreal, self-aware and self-abusive, the modern Hollywood comedy is one of the cheeriest things about contemporary cinema. With a knowing wink toward the old-fashioned mayhem of such monochrome classics as Hellzapoppin’, it is routine to find rival anchormen engaged in combat battle or Christopher Walken ruling over a kung fu ping-pong island. Nowadays, even the relative realism of the Apatow milieu is verité by way of Caddyshack.
Strange Wilderness, despite attracting some of the worst notices this side of Paris Hilton’s The Hottie And The Nottie, shares the same pleasingly anarchic bent. A stoner comedy that appears to have been fashioned by the stoner for the stoner, in lieu of professionalism we find a cast cracking up at the preposterousness of their own film, in lieu of plot we find a Bunch Of Stuff Happening.
Those acquainted with the Adam Sandler church of high jinx (he is here in spirit and as producer) will instantly recognise the form. Our hero, Steve Zahn, is a wastrel on a nonsensical mission. In order to save his late father’s nature show, he and his ne’er-do-well bong-jockey chums, determined to boost their TV ratings, set out to find Bigfoot. Then Ernest Borgnine appears. Then a rabid turkey attacks Mr. Zahn’s precious parts. And so on.
Sometimes the gross out juvenilia works and sometimes it requires you to find breasts really, really hilarious. But as history has taught us, it takes more than a hit-and-miss script to prevent people like Steve Zahn (Rescue Dawn), Justin Long (Dodgeball) and Jonah Hill (Superbad) from being laugh-out-loud funny.
It’s no Harold And Kumar Get The Munchies, you understand. By any scientific measure it’s a shambles. An audaciously lackadaisical final scene sees Jonah Hill and Jeff Garlin (Larry David’s “fat fuck” pal in Curb Your Enthusiasm) actually erupt in laughter at the dumbness of their own movie. You might mistake it for hucksterism if it wasn’t so apparently guileless. Watching Zahn and his crew scribbling their terrible voiceover for their nature films on napkins – “More than 80% of the world‘s monkey population are monkeys” – you’re pretty sure that’s awfully close to their actual production process. Good for them.