'Strangers With Candy': Humor's the same, screen is bigger

Devotees of the cult TV show "Strangers With Candy," which ran for three seasons on Comedy Central before living on in comfy DVD sets, will tell you that the movie version, which opens today, is hilarious.

ThinkFilm 'Strangers With Candy' 2 out of 5 stars The verdict: For cult hit, enlarging the plot and characters is a stretch. Director: Paul Dinello Starring: Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, Paul Dinello, Matthew Broderick, Sarah Jessica Parker Run time: 87 minutes Release date: June 28, 2006 Rating: R for sexual content, language and some drug material. See showtimes Meet Amy Sedaris For the star of 'Strangers with Candy,' comedy comes naturally. On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate 'Strangers With Candy'   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

If you don't think so, they will argue, likely in snide e-mails, that it's because you just don't get it. The show, they say, was so genius that if you don't find the film version hilarious, stretched as it is like cheap drugstore pantyhose, you are obviously suffering from Irony Deficit Disorder.

Don't believe it. "Strangers With Candy," the film, is a huge mess, with boatloads of talent sailing rudderless on the Bad Adaptation Sea. It's the kind of film you want to like, desperately hope to like, but its laughs are few.

Led by Amy Sedaris' sometimes hilarious cipher, twitchy-eyed Jerri Blank, an ex-con (also: ex-prostitute, ex-junkie, ex-omnisexual), "Strangers With Candy" takes place before the same-named series. It begins with a short, near-funny prison montage, then deposits Blank in her hometown. She's desperate to revive her coma-addled father (Dan Hedaya, unused) by re-creating her high school years (and, no, it doesn't make sense on film, either).

This launches the film into the series' premise: a troll-like Jerri (stretch pants, bad wigs, awful teeth) navigates the seemingly innocent, gauzy world of an ABC After School Special.

Jerri decides that she must win a school science fair to reawaken her father, and enlists jailbait teens to do her bidding while spouting absurdisms and chewing scenery as a character of both grotesque eroticism and twee vulnerability.

Unfortunately, for fans of the series, there's very little that doesn't feel like a retread. And for those who only know Sedaris from her brother David's "Talent family" stories and her hilarious guest spots on "The Late Show With David Letterman," the film will seem unbearably inside, a series of interchangeable gross gags and naughty non sequiturs that wouldn't be out of place on "Robot Chicken" or "Family Guy."

The movie only snaps to life when "The Colbert Report's" Stephen Colbert appears. As a closeted teacher whose abuse of his students is matched only by his own self-hatred, Colbert is alone in matching Sedaris' manic goofiness. His straight-arrow delivery of lines like, "I wasn't pushing you away; I was pulling me toward myself," enlivens otherwise vacant scenes.

It's such a bummer that the combined talents of Sedaris, Colbert and several alums from the series can't make this work. You almost wish the long-delayed movie had stayed on the shelf, the object of speculation and hope instead of the shambling mess that limps along on the big screen.

"Strangers" has more dead spots than a cemetery, despite the obvious comedic talent of Sedaris, who is genius, but whose impact seems to shrink, shrivel, then disappear past the halfway mark.

Underwhelming and affected cameos from Sarah Jessica Parker (looking like she crammed her appearance in between In Style photo shoots), Matthew Broderick, Iam Holm (!), Philip Seymour Hoffman (!!) and Allison Janney don't help minuscule set-pieces and flat directing.

You know your ironic, smarter-than-the-mainstream movie is in big trouble when the biggest laugh is a grown man running down a school hallway in a thong.

"Stranger With Candy" might grow in appeal with repeated viewings, warming on cable and DVD like Chris Rock's underrated "Pootie Tang." But on the big screen, it's a lost misfit in a long hallway of high school horrors. And it probably deserves that wedgie it's going to get.