The 5 Worst ‘SNL’ Movies
Earlier this week, the boys from Please Don’t Destroy gave Entertainment Weekly a first look at their new movie, Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain. The movie was supposed to drop in theaters this weekend but has been pushed to Peacock in November — and we hope that’s not a bad sign. After all, movies connected with Saturday Night Live don’t have a great track record. For every successful Wayne’s World, there are bombs like Superstar and Stuart Saves His Family. And those stinkers aren’t even in the bottom five!
Which sketch-to-film adaptations are the worst of the worst? Here are my choices for the five worst SNL movies of all time…
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The Ladies Man
The only reason Leon Phelps, the titular Ladies Man, worked as well as he did on SNL was because Tim Meadows is so damn likable. That affability can get you through a four-minute sketch — that and the incongruity of Meadows saying things like “butt lotion” — but stretch out dumb sex jokes over 90 minutes and you got trouble. “Arguably the limpest film yet spun out from a Saturday Night Live sketch,” raved The New York Post.
A Night at the Roxbury
It’s a wonder that SNL found a way to bring back the two head-banging brothers for multiple sketches, much less a feature-length movie. Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan getting rejected to the strains of What Is Love? is pretty funny once, but what’s the joke the second time? The fact the characters barely spoke was also a problem. Once Kattan and Ferrell got in a room with movie producers, the producers understandably asked what the characters sounded like. The two comics looked at each other and said, “Uh, we’re not ready for this.”
Blues Brothers 2000
Jim, we watched John Belushi. We laughed at John Belushi. We loved John Belushi. And Jim, you’re no John Belushi.
The original Blues Brothers featured all-time great blues musicians, Dan Aykroyd with a Belushi and endless, senseless destruction of motor vehicles. “The sequel offers more of the same,” said Variety, “only less.”
Coneheads
We’re not picking on you, Dan Aykroyd, honest. But the film version of Coneheads, based on a once fresh and funny series of sketches, came along about 15 years too late. Roger Ebert put on his steel-tipped boots for the ass-kicking: “This is a dismal, dreary and fairly desperate movie, in which the actors try very hard but are unable to overcome an uninspired screenplay.”
It’s Pat
How is it possible that It’s Pat, a movie reviled when it was originally released, has somehow gotten worse with age?
The original sketches played Pat’s androgyny for laughs; now those jokes around gender identity have taken on an extra layer of cruelty. It doesn’t help that Julia Sweeney’s character, with a sniveling whine and obnoxious outlook on life, was immensely unlikable. The film grossed $60,822, which is almost impossible. “It's Pat offers a simple message of self-acceptance, asserting that what counts is who you are rather than what your gender may or may not be,” offeredThe LA Times. “The trouble is that its telling is truly terrible.”
