Steve Zahn, an expert at playing likeable idiots, stars as the host of an incompetent wildlife TV show who goes off to find Bigfoot. The jokes and the pacing have a stoner tone that foregoes sense or coherence for an easygoing stupid-on-purpose humour. This is idiocy that sometimes borders on druggy genius.

Starring: Steve Zahn, Allen Covert
Directed by: Fred Wolf
Parental advisory: coarse language, drug use, crude and sexual humour, brief nudity
Running time: 87 minutes
Rating: One star out of five

There’s an audience for a certain kind of stoner humour -- and I know you’re out there; I can hear your brain cells dying -- that will be in blissed-out heaven over Strange Wilderness, a so-bad-it’s-bad comedy that unfolds with the slow senselessness of druggy incoherence. You don’t have to be high to see this movie, but the only other alternative seems to be actual unconsciousness.

It stars Steve Zahn as Peter Gaulke -- also the name of one of the movie’s co-writers -- who is the host of a wildlife TV show that gets everything wrong, or, in some cases, gets it stupid (“It is estimated that bears kill over two million salmon a year. Attacks by salmon on bears are much more rare.”). When the show is yanked off the air for general incompetence, Peter and his crew have to go to Ecuador to film Bigfoot and reclaim their time slot, which is 3 a.m. on weekdays.

Among the people on this road trip are Allen Covert, playing soundman Fred Wolf, also the name of the movie’s other co-writer and its director. This is probably whack, or would be to those with ownership of a very large bong. Speaking of which, there is also Junior (Justin Long of Dodgeball), who smokes marijuana throughout the film -- stoned stupid, Junior is, but in his own way, very wise -- and Cooker (Jonah Hill, the fat kid from Knocked Up and Superbad), who hits people in the crotch with his hand buzzer. The bad guy, a competing wildlife show host, is played by Harry Hamlin. The cameraman is played by 89-year-old Ernest Borgnine, although he disappears for much of the film, being older and therefore even wiser than Junior.

This is all just window-dressing, however, for the series of disconnected routines that highlight the narrow range of stupidity that the film hammers you with, relentlessly, until you either smile or wince, which is close enough. Strange Wilderness happens with a deliberate giddiness that makes it feel as if even the film stock is undergoing a contact high. There’s a sequence, for instance, when Peter is urinating in the woods and is attacked by a wild turkey that attaches itself to his private parts and has to be pulled off, like toffee. The scene runs past any hope of a punchline, until you realize that the joke is just that this is a stupid thing to have happened.

Well, Strange Wilderness is a stupid thing to have happened as well, although some of it has a sort of idiotic genius -- like Zahn’s attempts to speak Spanish in a girlish voice, which makes him sound like the offspring of Charo and Speedy Gonzalez -- that feels inspired, if not inhaled. Likewise, the meeting with Bigfoot has a surprising suddenness that would actually be funny had we not been bludgeoned into insensibility by the build-up.

Wolf, making his directorial debut (and, if all goes according to plan, his farewell tour), has an easy-going style that could be due to the fact that nothing is supposed to make sense anyway, so what the hell. And Zahn has a facility for playing confused morons -- we remember with pleasure his escaped convict in Out of Sight -- that keeps us watching, if only in horrified fascination. Strange Wilderness is harmless enough, but you wouldn’t want to operate heavy machinery afterward.

© (c) CanWest MediaWorks Publications Inc.