I Watched This On Purpose: Strange Wilderness

Sometimes, even The A.V. Club isn't impervious to the
sexy allure of ostensible cultural garbage. Which is why there's I Watched This
On Purpose, our feature exploring the impulse to spend time with trashy-looking
yet in some way irresistible entertainments, playing the long odds in hopes of
a real reward. And a good time.

Cultural infamy: Strange Wilderness just hit theaters earlier
this year, and it's already been forgotten by history. The teaser-trailer was
the first sign of a disaster: It was just 30 seconds of a weird-looking shark,
with a stoned voice laughing over it. "Yes," this movie seemed to scream, "I am
looking only for the lucrative stoner market!" As for reviews, Strange was slaughtered: It's got
an amazing ZERO percent on Rottentomatoes.com (meaning no published review could
be called "positive" in any way), and a 12 percent on Metacritic. That's isn't
a good sign. Our own Steven Hyden gave it a C-, but he did
concede that it offered a few laughs.

Curiosity factor: Not super-high, to be
honest. (Get it?) This is one of those I Watched This On Purpose movies that I
was pretty sure was going to be as bad as the world seems to think it is, which
is actually part of the fun of this ongoing psychological experiment. (How many
purposeful bad-movie-watching experiences does it take to put us off trying?
It's more than a hundred!) Then again, I found plenty to laugh at while
watching Grandma's Boy, and I went into that with a certain sense of dread. The cast
here looks pretty good, with one-time indie golden boy Steve Zahn at the
forefront, and support from Jonah Hill, Jeff Garlin, and even Ernest Borgnine.
Also: Director Fred Wolf co-wrote Dirty Work, starring Norm MacDonald!
Oh, and it's rated R. If this thing were PG-13, I don't think I'd go near it. I
have to get at least few laughs from spending 90 minutes with those zany nuts,
don't I?

The viewing experience: Or do I? I can't really
remember many laughs at this point, because I'm overwhelmed by the malaise that Strange Wilderness
inspired. Rarely does a movie with any sort of budget succeed so thoroughly at
looking like nobody was trying very hard to do anything at all. Imagine that
group of actors "riffing" for 85 minutes, and you'd probably come up with
something funnier and more entertaining than this movie, which was presumably
written beforehand. (It's tough to tell.)

Before I continue ranting, I should say—in
case it isn't clear above—that I don't have anything against stupid
comedies, stoner comedies, or stupid stoner comedies. Though I don't partake
myself, I realize the comedy potential of pot. The scene in the first Harold
& Kumar
movie where Kal Penn imagines spending the rest of his life with a giant
anthropomorphic bag of weed—amazing. Next Friday? I like it plenty. But
this… This wasn't a pot comedy. Everybody involved may have been smoking, but
there was no one around to tell them to shut the fuck up, so they just kept
rolling (joints and reels).

The plot, such as it is: Steve Zahn's dad used to
host a nature show, but he died, so Zahn and his stoner buddies took it over.
Since they're a bunch of idiots, the show is basically a bunch of idiots
filming wild animals, then making up stupid "facts" about them to read in
voiceover. If this were a real show, it would be wildly popular, wouldn't it?
But in this fantasyland, the show is on at 3 a.m. and has low ratings,
especially compared to its rival show, hosted by Harry Hamlin. In order to save
their show (it's called Strange Wilderness) from being cancelled, Zahn and his
crew—sound guy Allen Covert, gopher Jonah Hill, cameraman Justin "Mac
commercial" Long, and a token hottie tour guide—set out to Ecuador, where
their friend Joe Don Baker has spotted Bigfoot. They figure, rightfully so,
that their show won't be cancelled if they can get some footage of this

mythical monster.

Oh, I almost forgot Peter Dante, a.k.a. "that guy
who can't get any acting work except in movies starring or produced by his pal
Adam Sandler." Dante has a horrible tan, and his only acting mode is
stupefied/incredulous, but he actually gave me my first chuckle in Strange
Wilderness.

Sure, it's cheap and easy, but after nearly eight
minutes without a laugh in what promised to be a wacky screwball comedy, I'll
take what I can get.

So after a tedious run-through of some of the
show's exploits, it's off to Ecuador in a big-ass RV. There are a couple of
distractions as our team needs to get money, in some gags that fall horribly,
horribly flat. In one five-minute sequence, Zahn and Covert mess with some
Latino gangsters, who knock out their teeth with a hydraulic-assisted car. Then
they go to the dentist. No one laughs. Which leads me to this thought:
Throughout this movie, when things get horribly slow, there's yelling or
fighting. I'm no expert in comedy writing, but I think that might be a sign
that you're out of ideas. Take this scene, in which Zahn and Covert are
auditioning animal handlers. Clearly they thought they were in for some
hysterical reactions from moviegoers. I challenge you to laugh.

Looks like a bad Budweiser commercial, doesn't it?
Yes it does.

Anyway, back to the road trip: Our crew shoots
some action along the way (in order to somehow finance the trip? It makes no
sense), but all of the action leads to one scene that clearly writers Fred Wolf
and Peter Gaulke—also the names of the two lead characters, in a brave
display of not giving a fuck—built this whole miserable movie around.
Zahn is taking a piss in the woods, and he's attacked by a wild turkey, which
attaches itself to his penis. He runs screaming toward the camera with the
super-fake-looking turkey attached to his dick. (There's a whole making-of on
the DVD—I wish I were kidding.) This leads to a scene in a hospital in
which a sexy nurse must try to remove the turkey from Zahn's erect penis by
massaging the turkey's neck. (Of course.) I will admit to a couple of giggles
during this scene, and though it wasn't hilarious, I found myself thinking that
if the whole movie had taken this ridiculous tone, it might've fared a little
better.

Beyond that scene, things get even sadder. It's
intimated that Zahn is raped by border patrol. There's a whole scene in which
everybody giggles because there's a guy named Dick. And then there's a bit of
stunt-casting with Robert Patrick, who plays a Vietnam vet that's supposed to
guide the crew to Bigfoot. But he's only in one scene, and only because the
filmmakers had another elaborate dick joke they needed to make.

In the movie, you actually get to see Patrick's
mangled wang, but I didn't want to scare you people. Also: totally not worth
it, so don't rent Strange Wilderness just for this scene. (Actually, if you're the
kind of person who would rent a movie just to see a mangled penis, this might
be the movie for you.)

So Patrick conveniently disappears (good
plotting), Harry Hamlin's competing team is conveniently murdered by pygmies,
and Zahn leads his team to Bigfoot's lair. And what do they do when they get
there? Clearly the screenwriters didn't know either, so they had the team get
scared and shoot Bigfoot. To death. He's onscreen for about 30 seconds. A scene
in which they try to justify the killing is good for a laugh or two ("Anybody
remember what that big bastard said before he came at us?"), but the movie
quickly winds down from there. There's one more big scene that I won't even
bother to tell you about, because I already got stupider watching it, and I
don't want to go through that again.

In the movie's final shot, Zahn and Covert start
to crack up (for real) because the dialogue is so stupid, and then the movie ends.
It's as if to say, "Joke's on you, suckers!" Or maybe not. There's a certain
amount of hubris involved in tacking more than an hour of bonus material onto a
movie this shitty—there's a Comedy Central special, some deleted scenes
that are just as bad as the regular scenes, and a whole bit of Jonah Hill
improvising a song. During the aforementioned "making of the turkey/dick
scene," the cast and crew sit around the monitors and crack up. Makes you
wonder what they're smoking.

How much of the experience wasn't a total waste
of time?
I'm not sure how to add up the millisecond-long chuckles I experienced during Strange
Wilderness.
Let's give them massive benefit of the doubt and say they add up to one minute.
At a slim 85 minutes, that means the percentage of time that wasn't
wasted—and thus the score—is just above 1 percent. Yes, that bad.