The unique history of the stoner film begins in 1936 with Tell Your Children, a cautionary tale about the dangers of marijuana. The movie was quickly forgotten, but in the 1960s, reissued as Reefer Madness. Billed as a comedy, the film became a pothead manifesto for its bizarre and campy antics. Even Karl Rove was a fan. Since then, the genre has produced cult classics by the likes of Cheech & Chong and Kevin Smith, and even found some critical praise with The Big Lebowski.
Stoner cinema’s most recent master is director Danny Leiner, responsible for both the infamous Dude, Where’s My Car? and the brilliant Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. Leiner’s films (particularly Harold & Kumar) succeed because they eschew plot in favor of single-minded pursuit, mimicking the mentality that cannabis tends to produce. The stoner movie doesn’t need a quality storyline. It just has to be funny.
That’s why director Fred Wolf’s Strange Wilderness bombs spectacularly. It’s devoid of almost any humor whatsoever, high- or low-brow.
There’s too much plot for a stoner flick and it’s mind-blowingly trite at the same time. Peter Gaulke (Steve Zahn) is the heir to his father’s wildly successful wildlife show, Strange Wilderness. Unfortunately, Gaulke is an idiot who surrounds himself with idiots, all incapable of doing the show. Fired by his network and replaced by a smug megastar (Harry Hamlin), Gaulke, his best friend Fred Wolf (Allen Covert), and his crew head south to Ecuador in search of bigfoot. Idiocy ensues.
The humor is supposed to consist of the interactions between the crew (which includes Jonah Hill, Justin Long, Kevin Heffernan and Ashley Scott as the requisite eye-candy) and their collective failure as wildlife photographers and researchers. This an amusing concept that is abandoned in favor of 87 minutes of men being hit in the balls (or rather, actors pretending to be hit in the balls).
Strange Wilderness features two full-fledged shots of horribly disfigured male genitalia and its climax involves puking into a fake shark’s mouth. They laugh for an eternity when they meet a guy named “Dick.” They make stupid noises for a full minute over stock film of a great white. They get high on nitrous oxide and draw a penis on the wall.
The only line I managed to snicker at was a voice-over from Zahn stating that bears haven’t killed more people “than World War I and World War II combined.” That piece of wit will probably fly over the heads of anyone baked enough to find anything else in the movie amusing.
This kind of movie needs to be completely bizarre to work. Where are the hot alien chicks? Where’s this film’s Neil Patrick Harris? Nothing here is surreal enough; it’s not even close.
What are these actors doing in this crap? Steve Zahn used to be a respectable actor. Justin Long (better known as the Mac guy) has been rising quickly. Jonah Hill just launched himself with Superbad. There’s even an Oscar-winner here: Ernest Borgnine won 1955’s Best Actor for Marty. Meanwhile, Harry Hamlin continues to compete with Mark Hamill for “Worst Career Choices By An Once-GreatFantasy Actor Whose Last Name Starts With ‘Ham.’”
If you enjoyed Harold and Kumar’s zany antics, stay the hell away from this movie. If you didn’t, stay the hell away from this movie. If you are still breathing, stay away. Strange Wilderness is as funny as a colonoscopy.
Actually, that’s not really fair. You could probably make a better comedy about a colonoscopy.
Overall rating: D-