I love Saturday Night Live. I think the last election, with Obama and McCain and Palin and Biden, showed just how relevant SNL can be. I think “D*** in a Box” is one of the funniest things I’ve seen this decade. I also acknowledge how often they swing and miss. I was watching the Saturday Night Live 25th Anniversary Special a few years ago, and Chris Rock had the best line of the night. I guess that’s to be expected; when does he NOT have the best line? The only person I’ve ever seen steal the scenery from him is Wanda Sykes. Anyway, the line was something like this:
While we’re all celebrating and patting each other on the back, I look around this room and I think, “some of the worst movies ever made were done by people sitting here.”
That’s not the exact quote, but you get the point. Thus, I will now list the worst movies ever made by SNL cast members. In the next post, I’ll make a list of the best. That list will be shorter. The reason that this is a top nine list and not a top ten is that, for the life of me, I can’t watch anymore of these awful movies.
9. Superstar. What happens when you take an unfunny sketch and make it into a movie? This. It’s like marrying the person you dated in junior high. It was a bad idea then, and it’s an even worse idea now.
8. It’s Pat, the Movie. The ambiguously sexed and gendered Pat was actually pretty fun the first two times it come up in SNL. Julia Sweeney is also a genuinely talented comedian and storyteller. This movie took whatever goodwill existed with the character and trounced it. In the original sketch, the premise (that no one knows whether Pat is male or female) works because offices have a semi-formality to them that forces you to talk around possibly offensive statements. In a movie that takes place out of that environment, it fails. Unambiguously.
7. Eight Crazy Nights. Adam Sandler seems to think that funny voices and abusing the elderly is what animated films are all about. He wrong. Why didn’t any tell him before this thing was made?
6. Deuce Bigelow, Male Gigolo. In the early days of SNL, Dan Akroyd had a sketch about a male prostitute. It was really funny; this was not. I’ll throw in DB2, the sequel, just so I don’t actually have to watch that, too. This makes me sad because there are very few people in entertainment with any Filipino background, Rob Schneider is a quarter Filipino, and thus I feel 25% responsible for these movies
5. Stuart Saves His Family. All I have to say is that Stuart Smalley is now a Senator.
4. The Hot Chick. Rob Schneider shows up again, this time in a movie in a movie about a shallow, attractive woman who learns to look beyond first appearances. This is a form of irony because a) the trailer for this movie stuck so bad that a first appearance would lead you to believe the movie would be abysmal, and b) it turns out that first appearance was right.
3. A Night At the Roxbury. Will Farrell should probably be on this list more often, but I’ll be darned if I don’t laugh during his movies. This is worst of all the movies I’ve seen with him in it, continuing the “unfunny sketch/unfunny movie” genre of movies. If I saw Chris Kattan on the street I’d probably ask him for my money back.
2. You Don’t Mess with the Zohan. Adam Sandler is a terrible, terrible writer and producer; probably one of the worst SNL ever produced. Imagine if you could combine that with prisoner exchanges, bad metrosexual jokes, and a title brazenly stolen from The Big Lebowski. Well, you don’t have to imagine. Here it is.
And #1, which is not only the worst movie on this list, but vies with Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World for The Worst Movie I’ve Ever Seen In My Life:
1. Dirty Work. Norm MacDonald dead pan delivery, only without the pan. This movie was so awful that I actually stopped eating my popcorn and started looking at my watch DURING THE OPENING CREDITS. It was “directed” by Bob Sagat, who had several directing projects in the works until this movie came out. Supposedly, the movie this steamin’ pile hit the screen Sagat was canned from the other jobs. He should have been slapped with the Sunday edition of the New York Times, then someone should have taken that same NYT and slapped Norm MacDonald. If you ever see this movie in the video store, accidentally ruin it. That act alone will get you out of 100 years of purgatory, which, incidentally, is what it feels like when you’re watching Dirty Work.
Hah! That’s awesome!