Superstar

There’s good news and bad news to report about Superstar, the newest film from the fertile mind of "Saturday Night Live" producer Lorne Michaels. The good news is that it’s not the worst SNL-inspired movie of all time. That dubious honor goes to It’s Pat, The Coneheads, and A Night at the Roxbury.

The bad news is that Superstar is a bad movie. Weighing in at 82 minutes, it’s nothing more than a one-joke SNL skit stretched into a full-length motion picture.

Molly Shannon reprises her Mary Katherine Gallagher character from SNL. She’s the gawky, frump of a girl in the plaid Catholic school uniform who ends each skit by falling backward onto a collapsible table, flashing her underpants in the process. Mary Katherine’s other sight gag is to place her hands in her armpits, pulling them out to sniff.

The movie introduces us to Mary Katherine’s upbringing, as if we really care.

She winds up as a sexually repressed student at a Catholic high school. One truly woeful scene shows Mary Katherine passionately kissing a tree under the watchful eye of a nun. Mary Katherine pines for class hunk Sky Corrigan (Will Ferrell of "SNL"), but Sky has eyes instead for class babe Evian (Elaine Hendrix), a blonde cheerleader.

What amounts to nothing more than a short skit is loaded with enough filler material to warrant an inspection by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "SNL" fans and younger audience members might find some amusing moments in Superstar, but all things considered, this film is a pathetic joke.

Why is Congress wasting its time with HMO reform? For the betterment of mankind, I'd rather see a bill that bans SNL spinoffs.

The biggest mystery to me is why Tinseltown shows junk like Superstar, while passing on the best reviewed film of the year, American Beauty. Your guess is as good as mine.