Strange Wilderness is a new comedy starring Steve Zahn as the host of a wilderness television show with plummeting ratings. To increase viewership, he assembles a motley crew and sets out on an expedition to find Bigfoot. The cast includes Jonah Hill, Justin Long, Ashley Scott, Peter Dante, Jeff Garlin, and -- believe it or not -- Ernest Borgnine! The red band trailer for Wilderness just hit the internet. (Need a little incentive to check it out? There's nudity. You're welcome.) Cinematical spoke with two of the film's stars -- Kevin Heffernan (of Broken Lizard fame) and Allen Covert (pretty much every Adam Sandler movie, Grandma's Boy) -- about this film and their careers. First up is Kevin Heffernan...

Cinematical: Who do you play in the film?

Kevin Heffernan: I play a character named Whitaker. When they go out on this trip, they need to hire an animal wrangler. I'm a car mechanic and I have no animal wrangling experience. Basically, I'm just looking for a job. So I go and interview with them and I win the job but I have no knowledge of animals. I don't even like them that much really! It's got this great ensemble cast and some great cameos...

Cinematical: It does have such a great comedy cast, was improvisation encouraged on the set?

KH: Yeah man. The script was so good, I mean it was written by Fred Wolf and Peter Gaulke who have a lot of comedy writing experience, but it was just one of those kind of movies where there's always like six or seven people on the screen. And they left it free for us to do the improv stuff that we all love to do. So there were a lot of people going off, and they had to kind of pull you back to the script a little bit.

I'm conflicted on the Broken Lizard comedy troupe. I thought Super Troopers was pretty funny, but Club Dread was a complete disaster. Beerfest was extremely uneven, but had some really hilarious moments. So I approach their new project with a mixture of excitement and indifference I'm calling "indiffitement." The Slammin' Salmon will get all the Broken Lizard guys back together -- Kevin Heffernan, Jay Chandrasekhar, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske. Chandrasekhar typically directs Broken Lizard projects (and also did the dreaded Dukes of Hazzard), but this one will be helmed by Heffernan (he played Farva in Super Troopers), making his directorial debut.

According to Variety, the comedy will revolve around "a restaurant owner and former heavyweight champ who pits his wait staff against each other in a Glengarry Glen Ross - like competish." (Hey Variety, I love you -- you supply me with a lot of my movie news and for that I am grateful. But..."competish?" I like abbreves as much as the next guy, but writing out "competition" only takes two more strokes of the keyboard!) Sounds like it could be funny, and The Slammin' Salmon is certainly a title you don't forget. The gang is doing this film independently, to beat a potential Screen Actors' Guild strike. "We wanted to go back to our independent roots and get a project off the ground and into production quickly," says Heffernan. Expect Salmon to swim (upstream of course) into theaters next year.

The five-man comedy troupe known as Broken Lizard hit the scene in 2001, when their Super Troopers was chosen to play the Sundance Film Festival, which led to Fox Searchlight's purchase of the flick, which led to the sophomore-slump bomb Club Dread and the fairly successful Beerfest. And now the boys (Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske) are ready to suit up as cops and give the fans what they want: Super Troopers 2.

According to the MTV Movies blog, which had a brief chat with Mr. Soter, the troupe expects this to be their next flick: "There was a period of time where it seemed to us that the only way people recognized us at all was as Super Troopers. So we thought, let's get a few other films under our belt just to let people know that it's not the only thing that we do." The screenplay isn't written just yet, nor has Fox given them the official go-ahead, but Soter promises that the gang has a few cool ideas. Guess this means that Greek Road project might be put on the back burner by the Broken boys, but they managed to right their ship after the Club Dread disaster, so I'm curious to see what they come up with next. Sure, "sequel" is the easy way to go, but as long as its funny, what's the problem?

I never played drinking games in my collegiate youth -- I was never in a fraternity, did not study engineering and grew up in Canada, so the general idea was to just drink. Beerfest, the new comedy from the five-comedian collective known as Broken Lizard, begins as two American brothers, Jan (Paul Soter) and Todd (Erik Stolhanske) Wolfhouse take their dear departed father's ashes from Colorado to Munich, Germany to fulfill his last wishes. Along the way, they stumble into a secret international competition of drinking games called "Beerfest" -- an alternative to commercialized drink-fests, for as one member of the Australian team notes profanely, "Oktoberfest is for tossers and sheep-shaggers!" While disastrously failing to enact their dad's final wishes, the brothers have their family honor and national pride desperately bruised by the VonWolfhausen clan -- the German branch of the family, who perennially win Beerfest. Shamed but not broken, the Wolfhouse brothers set out to make a rag-tag team of drinking game, uh, athletes (and with ESPN2 carrying hot dog-devouring coverage between spelling bees and spear fishing, that's not such a crazy phrase) to win next year's Beerfest.

Beerfest is dumb as a box of rocks. It's a brawny, badly-shot mess that goes on a little too long. It has, as its stars, a group of five men who are far from conventionally handsome, and not conventionally funny. It doesn't hate women, but it doesn't have a lot for them to do aside from bare their breasts and provide exposition. And I loved it -- or, rather, I laughed during it and was consistently amused by audacity and stupidity going hand in hand. It's a dumb movie made by smart people, who took a pitch of 'Fight Club with beer' and managed to wrest a sports-movie parody out of it through sheer force of will while still mocking bad '80s action cinema, world cultural relations, and our relationship with, as noted sage Homer J. Simpson put it, "... Alcohol: The cause of -- and solution to -- all of life's problems." Beerfest is the best smart-yet-dumb American comedy since Dodgeball.