The Molly Shannon Vehicle Superstar is Weird and Sometimes Funny but Probably Does Not Need to Exist

It's almost as if making a movie based on a sketch character is a bad idea!

1999’s Superstar has the distinction of being the first, last and only Saturday Night Live movie with a female protagonist and a female star. 

Some folks ignorantly claim that 1994’s It’s Pat was cowritten by a woman who also portrayed the title character but the hilarity of Pat comes from the fact that NO ONE knows the character’s gender. On a similar level, no one can ever know the gender of Julia Sweeney, the funny person who breathed life into that most timeless and least problematic of comedy icons. 

But they sure can guess! Oh man/woman, I am laughing uproariously just thinking of that character’s shall we say unique approach to gender! Pat, whatever gender you are, you are HILARIOUS! Your pronouns should be Fun/Ny!

When Superstar hit theaters in 1999 SNL Studios was cranking out sketch-derived movies at a steady clip. The year before it put out a pair of little loved spin-offs in Blues Brothers 2000 and A Night at the Roxbury. 

Like Saturday Night Live itself, SNL Studios was a well-oiled machine pumping out cynical, subpar cinematic outings for a deeply unimpressed public.

Like A Night at the Roxbury, Superstar somehow grossed over thirty million dollars at the box-office yet isn’t seen as a success, commercially, critically or otherwise by anyone.

Superstar centers on television and pop culture-obsessed misfit Mary Katherine Gallagher (Molly Shannon), who would easily be the most off-putting protagonist for an SNL Movie in a world where It’s Pat and Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video do not exist. 

Mary Kathrine Gallagher is a strange recurring character, a deeply unwell misfit who alternates between a hushed, traumatized whisper and booming, outsized theatricality. 

She’s a deluded narcissist who lacks self-awareness and self-consciousness. She wants to be adored and worshipped by a world that barely tolerates her and her eccentricities, which include smelling her own armpits, dry-humping trees she has a disconcertingly sexual relationship with and performing monologues from various histrionic television movies from the distant past. 

Mary Katherine Gallagher is an intentionally clammy and awkward character, a misfit who makes everyone around her uncomfortable, particularly her teachers and her classmates. 

Superstar is at its funniest and most confident when its geeky protagonist is losing herself in one-woman recreations of message movies from bygone eras. The humor comes from the profound disconnect between Mary’s queasy innocence and the worldly decadence of the characters she’s playing. 

We open with a prologue that establishes that Mary’s two great obsessions in life involve kissing a cute boy and attaining super-stardom as an actress, singer, dancer and all-around performer. 

Mary’s parents died a tragic death the film finds hilarious so she lives with a grandmother played by Glynis Johns of Mary Poppins fame. 

Then comes a Bratz: The Movie style time jump to high school. Mary is widely reviled for being different. That much is true to life. The popular kids hurl insults in her direction, particularly Evian Graham (Elaine Hendrix), the girlfriend of Sky Corrigan (Will Ferrell), the most popular boy in school. 

Ferrell, who was literally just a tiny little baby when Superstar was made, is a lot of fun playing a glad-handing phony who is an inveterate lunchroom politician but also seemingly a good guy underneath it all. 

Mary is put in special education classes where she sort of bonds with her fellow misfits, most notably Helen (Emmy Laybourne), who encourage her in her dream of winning the school talent show and with it a role as an extra in a movie with positive moral values. 

From the moment Mary mentions that she loves Carrie an invisible countdown begins as to when Superstar will parody the iconic climax of Brian De Palma’s slightly more satisfying exploration of teen angst. 

When it arrives, the inevitable nod to Carrie is predictably anti-climactic. When a gag is inevitable and you can see it coming from universes away it loses the element of surprise.

Mary is irrevocably attracted to Sky but she’s also intrigued by Eric Slater (Harland Williams( , a motorcycle-riding cool outsider in the vein of Luke Perry’s Dylan McKay or Christian Slater in Heathers. 

Williams is a very funny performer. I have fond memories of seeing him perform at the Gathering of the Juggalos and kill with weird one liners.

I just wrote up the fifth Scream movie and I couldn’t help but notice that David Arquette and Harland Williams were both goofy-looking young men who have aged magnificently into silver foxes. They are both extremely handsome at this stage in their lives and careers. 

Williams was already thirty-seven when Superstar was released. He was at least twice as old as the character he’s playing. Superstar doesn’t try to pretend that the twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings in its cast are believable teenagers. 

The actors playing high school kids are deliberately geriatric. When Superstar was made Shannon was 35 and Ferrell was 32. In that respect they were honoring the time-honored tradition of middle-aged actors and actresses with ulcers and messy divorces and grandchildren playing fresh-faced teens in film. 

Take Dear Evan Hansen. Star Ben Platt actually celebrated his one hundredth birthday while filming a movie where he plays a teenager. Platt famously went directly from filming to hospice and passed away mere days after shooting finished.

There was a real sense of urgency with the Dear Evan Hansen film adaptation because they had to finish it before Platt died of old age, surrounded by his great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandchildren. 

Deliberately making its teenagers long in the tooth is a running gag but like so much else in the movie, that’s a joke that just doesn’t land, and may not even be a joke in the first place. 

Even more than most films inspired by popular sketch characters, Superstar feels defiantly non-cinematic. It’s just barely a movie. Screenwriter and Saturday Night Live veteran Steve Koren, who also co-wrote A Night at the Roxbury, has cobbled together a lazy assemblage of sketches rooted in Catholic high school, humiliation and the gauntlet of humiliation that is a Catholic school education. 

Ferrell does double duty as Mary’s conception of God, a goofball cross between her crush and White Jesus in fantasy sequences that feel so much like Saturday Night Live sketches that I half expected to see G.E. Smith making orgasmic faces while man-handling his electric guitar in between scenes. 

Mary loves to sing as well as act and is woefully incompetent at both but the film’s best scene is both musical and utterly unexpected. 

I am a big fan of non-musicals where musical sequences unexpectedly erupt so I was a sucker for the glorious moment when Mary fantasizes that Sky asks her to do the Robot with him and the entire lunchroom spontaneously breaks into an elaborately choreographed dance to C+C Music Factory’s “(Gonna Make You Sweat) Everybody Dance Now.” 

It could be a parody of a similarly preposterous, unmotivated dance set-piece in She’s All That, which was a splashy hit ten months earlier or the comedy could come from the sheer randomness. 

Regardless this ebullient bit of foolishness is undoubtedly the movie’s high mark, along with Ferrell’s performance and Mary’s reenactments of Carter-era television movies.

I hope you are all sitting down and are holding onto your monocles tightly, because I do not want them to shatter in surprise and have you hold me financially responsible for them breaking. 

Really stretching the definition of “Classic” there,

This movie based on a Saturday Night Live recurring character has some funny moments but really doesn’t hold together as a three act film. It’s almost as if making movies based on these characters is an inherently bad idea that nevertheless led to the creation of some very good movies that I have either already written up (like The Blues Brothers and The Coneheads) or look forward to writing up in the near future. 

For those keeping score Superstar is better than It’s Pat, Blues Brothers 2000 and A Night at the Roxbury but not as good as The Ladies Man, Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video, The Blues Brothers or Coneheads. 

We have plenty to look forward to in this journey, most notably a pair of movies about Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar, MacGruber and Stuart Saves His Family. 

The worst is over. The best is yet to come.

Next up: Stuart Saves His Family