The project was conceived by SNL’s first head writer, Michael O’Donoghue, as a spoof of the 1962 documentary/exploitation film Mondo Cane, and traded on O’Donoghue’s onscreen SNL persona as “Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video wasn’t ready for prime time or late night. Saturday Night Live’s expansion into the cinematic arena got off to an inauspicious start with an anthology film originally planned as a one-off fill-in for SNL, which was later shunted to theaters after it was rejected by NBC censors for its extreme content (at least by the standards of late-1970s broadcast TV). So we took a long trip back through the history of Saturday Night Live-derived films to chart their curious evolution and see where they stacked up in terms of timeliness (How closely does it follow the popularity of the TV character that spawned it?), weirdness (How like MacGruber is it?), SNL connection (How closely tied is it to its SNL inspiration?), humor, and a quality we’re calling “Movieosity,” a measure of its cinematic qualities and whether it holds together as a bona fide motion picture rather than just an exercise in synergy. This week’s Movie Of The Week, the hilarious 2010 action-movie spoof MacGruber, illustrates what Saturday Night Live movies are capable of at their weirdest and most inspired. And once you factor in movies like Office Space, Bob Roberts, and A Mighty Wind, movies many don’t realize have roots in the TV show, the SNL filmography looks even more impressive.

Sure, some terrible films originated with Saturday Night Live, but so did beloved and influential comedies like The Blues Brothers and Wayne’s World. The worst SNL-derived films invite that view, but it seems unfair when considering the surprising diversity, venerability, and even, yes, quality of the films inspired by the deathless television institution. They are similarly notorious for attempting to stretch a single joke to feature-length. They are widely, and often accurately, derided as cynical attempts to spin popular television characters into a medium that neither demands nor welcomes them.

Movies derived from Saturday Night Live do not have the best reputation, to put it mildly.

Movies like night at the roxbury