The Most Bizarre 'SNL' Movies You Forgot Existed

Stuart Smalley, portrayed by Al Franken, is a self-improvement guru with a sibilant S and not much in the way of self-confidence. The SNL character's feature-length film flopped at the box office. In the film Smalley loses everything and must race to salvage his career and family.

One of the reasons it came off so weird, according to Franken and producer Trevor Albert, is that it was marketed as "an SNL movie." Albert told Vanity Fair, "We should have been advertising at, you know, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings."

Franken agrees: "There’s a lot of people in recovery, and a lot of organizations that are tied to recovery, and I think that if they’d seen [the movie] first, it might not have had that rookie-soldier-in-an-ambush thing... This was kind of not in [Paramount’s] wheelhouse. I’m not quite sure they knew who to sell this movie to at all, frankly."

In her post-SNL years, Julia Sweeney has carved out an impressive career as a monologist and writer. She's most associated with her acclaimed one-woman shows, like God Said Ha! and Letting Go of God. But for several years in the 1990s, Sweeney was known as Pat.

The androgynous character got the big-screen treatment in It's Pat, which grossed $60,000 in the US. Pat is a character of indeterminable gender who constantly confuses people - needless to say, the idea hasn't aged well.

His name is Leon Phelps, and he is the smooth-talking Casanova of the film's title. Played by Tim Meadows, Phelps looks and dresses like he's stuck in the 1970s but he's really living in modern-day, big-city America. He gives advice to listeners on his call-in talk show, despite the fact that his guidance is dubious at best. His whole shtick is that he's pretty much willing to get with any woman.

The Ladies Man was a cringe-worthy SNL skit before it became a feature film that both audiences and critics disliked. 

MacGruber is an equally resourceful but far less successful special ops agent than his much more famous counterpart, MacGyver. Will Forte and Kristen Wiig reprised their SNL roles in the movie version of MacGruber, which proved to be just as strange as the skits. Just like in the small-screen version, MacGruber and his companion Vicki get involved in a series of ridiculous scenarios that they somehow manage to survive.

During its brief time in theaters, MacGruber was a box office dud. 

Blues Brothers 2000 is the sequel to The Blues Brothers, and this was an unusual movie right from the beginning. Despite an impressive supporting cast of big-name blues musicians, this sequel was an attempt at a family-friendly makeover of the dark and edgy comedy on display in the original film.

The legendary Blues Brothers band that premiered on SNL in 1978 inspired the original production. The remake, however, was a much less impressive "update" on the beloved characters that even the fans couldn't get behind.  

Superstar remains true to Mary Katherine Gallagher's fundamental personality for her feature film makeover. She's still the klutziest, most bizarre Catholic schoolgirl you've ever seen, and she still enjoys breaking into dances and made-for-TV-movie monologues at a moment's notice.  

Superstar gave Molly Shannon a chance to flesh out the character, and the movie was a box office success. However, critics weren't fans - Roger Ebert called Mary Katherine "plain and hostile, a homely little bundle of resentment."