Cynical Cinema

Paramount Home Entertainment releases Strange Wilderness on May 20th. It’s yet another movie featuring Adam Sandler’s buddies, from his Happy Madison production company. This group seems to be able to churn out thirty movies a year, of varying quality from below-average to insanely putrid. Strange Wilderness is somewhere in the middle. It’s dreadful. It’s the story of a bunch of Adam Sandler’s friends who attempt to revive their flagging TV wilderness show (Strange Wilderness) by tracking down and finding and filming Bigfoot. Which ends up being a series of animal attacks, idiotic jokes, stoner jokes, and more animal attacks. See, there’s this turkey, and it attacked a guy while he was peeing, so it’s on his junk. And it’s stuck there. And it’s a special turkey, so they can’t just chop it’s head off and kill it. So they have to massage it’s neck, and there’s this hot nurse who has to do it, which means she’s really massaging…oh, come on.

The cast is fairly good, because it is full of some quality comic actors. Justin Long, Steve Zahn, and the always-funny Jonah Hill, who has some decent moments. But the script is so thin that there is no reason for anything to actually happen. It’s just a series of toilet humour jokes and painful gags that grows tiresome right away. Shark attacks are played for humour, with incredibly poor results, the one hot girl is constantly pursued by a bunch of horny drunken idiots, with the intended effect of creating comedy. Once again, with poor results. And the final bigfoot gag is so badly done, obvious and, amazingly for this movie, underplayed that it negates the entire premise of the film. Strange Wilderness is neither strange, nor does it involve good wilderness. It’s just stupid, and is best ignored altogether. Which is why I didn’t write a longer review.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 6:44 am and is filed under Ashley Scott, Jonah Hill, Robert Patrick, Joe Don Baker, 2008, Fred Wolf, Kevin Heffernan, Comedy, Steve Zahn, Ernest Borgnine, Allen Covert, Garbage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.