Absolute garbaj.

I try not to fall into the rabbit hole of stating “nobody asked for this” when talking about movies or shows, but in the world of things nobody asked for the most not-asked-for thing in 2005 would have been a Strangers With Candy prequel movie. A movie? Sure. A prequel? Not a fat chance. Nobody asked for this, and that’s why it grossed $2.3 million in the box office.

Strangers With Candy was a TV show that aired from 1999 to 2000 and lasted three seasons, with the series finale lampooning its own cancellation as the characters bomb the school and run off to be vagrants. It is hilarious, albeit incredibly edgy especially by today’s standards. Jerri and the other characters drop a lot of casually racist comments including just blurting out homophobic slurs every other episode. But it is a show that has a special place in my heart.

Being filmed and released five years after the original show but also being a prequel caused problems, notably with the cast. Roberto Gari is not back as Guy and I assume Dan Hedaya could not pull off the frozen look because in this version he’s just in a coma. Orlando Pabotoy did not come back as Orlando because he was way too old to pass as a high schooler at this point and they replaced his character completely with Megawatti Sukarnoputri (Carlo Alban). Also Derrick isn’t back for the same reason, because Larc Spies was too old. The main returning student character is Maria Thayer as Tammi Littlenut because Maria at 49 could probably still pull off a highschooler. Damn she looks good.

Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, and Paul Dinello are back as is Gregory Hollimon, Deborah Rush, and David Pasquesi as Stew. And Stew does serve as an example of what the Strangers With Candy movie is. A trace. Why is Stew here in the prequel? Because people recognize Stew. And to deliver his jokes. If you’ve seen the entire series of Strangers With Candy, then congratulations. You’ve seen the only good parts of the movie. If you haven’t watched the show, go watch the show instead of seeing the movie.

Sedaris has said that the movie came about because they were looking through their jokes and decided to turn it into a movie, but the jokes in this are all ripped and rehashed straight from the TV show. Only worse, because the delivery of those same jokes is much, much more stunted and awkward than it was in the TV show. This was the first feature length film directed by Paul Dinello, and he’s directed  a whole one movie since and it was Gym Teacher: The Movie, a made for TV Nickelodeon film.

Directing a film is very different than running a shoestring budget TV show.

It’s almost brutally poetic how stilted the delivery is in this movie since they presumably had the script written before shooting, whereas the television show was infamous for its writing. The script was often being re-written as the scenes were being shot, and there are a lot of times where characters are straight up reading the script for the first time as it’s being written on cue cards during shooting.

Ultimately Strangers With Candy suffers from two big problems. The new edition way long after the fact, and SNL syndrome by which I mean taking a shorter piece of content and stretching it to a feature length film. The amount of stretching they do for jokes makes the awful jokes feel that much longer and more painful and even the good jokes are pushed to the point of annoyance.

Rating: D