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.

Here's something you don't see everyday: Participant Prods. is teaming up with Broken Lizard producers Jay Chandrasekhar and Julia Dray on a new comedy called Taildraggers. For those who aren't familiar with Participant Prods., that's like saying Al Gore decided to co-direct a film with the Jackass boys. Participant, who's known more for their politically and environmentally aware films (Syriana, An Inconvenient Truth, Fast Food Nation) is making this their first geared toward a younger audience. That's not to say Taildraggers won't come with a friendly message attached; in fact, part of the plot includes uncovering "a plan to dig oil from the Alaskan nature preserve."

After playing Super Troopers, hedonistic swingers and competitive beer drinkers, it appears at least one Lizard will this time take on "a small Alaskan airline who face a bitter rivalry with a local taxi company." Man, we must be talking about one small airline if their biggest rival are a bunch of taxis. Unlike their previous films, however, Taildraggers will be written by Will Gluck, and not the entire Lizard team. In fact, I don't even know who that is. No word yet on whether the rest of the clan (Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, Erik Stolhanske) will be involved, but since none of them are mentioned, it seems Taildraggers will be more like a Liz production, then something put out by the entire Lizard crew. No word on a director or a start date, but if Chandrasekhar decided to step behind the camera, then look for some of his good pals to show up and lend a hand.

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?

How do you turn a standard pre-release filmmaker interview into something fun, funny, and packed with Patrick Swayze references? Well, you start off by interviewing 2 of the 5 Broken Lizard lunatics -- because regardless of what you thought of Club Dread, these are some seriously funny dudes. The second method for turning a potentially standard interview into something fresh and amusing -- do it in comic strip form! CulturePulp's Mike Russell has been doing the strip interviews for quite some time now, and they're all pretty darn great. And for those who prefer their filmmaker interviews to be delivered in a standard format, Russell's got you covered there too.

His most recent piece is an irreverent-yet-informative chit-chat with Steve Lemme & Erik Stolhanske, aka 2/5ths of the comedy troupe that gave you the hilarious Super Troopers, the bizarrely un-hilarious Club Dread, and the best Broken Lizard flick yet: Beerfest. Topics of animated (and somewhat drunken) conversation include Road House, Vincent Spano, Adam Sandler, Donald Sutherland, Cloris Leachman, Brian Bosworth, and the long-delayed release of The Onion Movie. Oh, and beer.

Ah, I almost forgot: The fate of Broken Lizard's most ambitious project yet (an ancient Olympian comedy called Greek Road) lies firmly within your hands, my friends. If enough people go see Beerfest, the Lizards will most likely get the bankroll they need to bring Greek Road to life ... and the concept alone sounds pretty damn funny.

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.

Over the past few years, the words 'Broken Lizard' have brought thoughts of mediocre silliness to most of our brains. That's all about to change. The same team who brought us Super Troopers and Club Dread are gearing up for their latest trip to, "Eh, it's okay" land with the film, Beerfest. Now, with brand spanking new Beerfest images on the net, those of you who want nothing more than to eat, breathe and crap this movie can rejoice for the time being.

After checking out said pictures, it does look funny ... yet awfully painful. Ya know, like how you feel after witnessing someone you don't know get completely sloshed and wind up vomiting in the corner. At first, it's funny ... but then you can't help but feel their pain. Described as Dodgeball meets a lot of beer, pic (in case you've forgotten) will focus on two American brothers who, after being humiliated in an underground beer-drinking tournament abroad, decide to assemble a rag-tag team of guzzlers to help defend their country's honor. Yeah, I know who this film is geared toward. Problem is, purchasing an admission ticket means giving up beer money. Seriously, is it really worth it? Is it?