It's Pat: The Movie (1994)

While Wayne's World wasn't the first film based on a “Saturday Night Live” skit (don't forget The Real Life Adventures of Mr. Bill, Bob Roberts and, of course, The Blues Brothers) and while it was a good comedy that stood on its own, it somehow gave the Powers That Be the impression that making further films based on five-minute skits that usually depend on simple recurring gags was a brilliant idea. To be fair, 1993's Coneheads was another good entry, but the original skits had a premise you could easily build two hours on. The film that followed Coneheads one year later, It's Pat!, was based on a series of skits about an awkward, unintentionally androgynous person and the people who try to figure out the gender. Stretching that out to feature length is probably a cinematic Gordian's knot.

The filmmakers approached this problem by “expanding” Pat's character into an ambitious loser in love but self-absorbed to the point of being a sociopath. The plot has Pat pursuing fame and fortune and balancing that with a romantic relationship with Chris, another accidental androgyne. The specter of the original skits finally emerges when Kyle, an average suburbanite, moves into Pat's apartment complex and becomes obsessed with learning about Pat's true gender. Here the film is in horrible danger of becoming original, as for one moment it looks like it is verging on becoming a thriller parody. This might have been a good-set up, especially if the film was told from the point of view from Kyle and followed up on the original skits' toying with the unspoken rules of politeness, stirred with large doses of parody (that the film does not even try to satirize The Crying Game, which came out just about two years before, is almost unspeakably criminal). Instead what comes out of the oven is yet another American comedy about a misfit with a “hilariously” deficient IQ. Whatever elements actually made the “It's Pat!” skits, slim as they were, stand out from the rest of the SNL crop have actually been downplayed.

What resources the film does have are squandered. Julia Sweeney barely gets any mileage out of the same character she created. Dave Foley and Kathy Griffin are badly misspent; Foley as Pat's personality-depraved lover Chris, and Kathy, although (sort of) playing herself, is set up as Pat's straight man, who barely resembles the cynical, gossipy persona that made her famous in the first place. Meanwhile Dave Foley is supposed to be as indeterminable as Pat, but it's obvious that Foley (who taps into the female characters he played on “Kids in the Hall”) is giving Chris a feminine appearance and mannerisms. Charles Rocket manages to fire off a few entertaining moments with a scenery-chewing performance as Pat's increasingly deranged stalker, but sadly any likable aspects of his role come in spite of the script. All in all, there actually is no lack of comedic talent here. That they were all involved and such a bland, unfunny movie was still the result took a lot of effort on someone's part.

What's really confusing, more confusing than whether Pat is a he or a she, is exactly what audience this film was aiming for. The filmmakers were apparently hoping for an audience with enough outside-the-mainstream tastes that they would be able to recognize and appreciate the appearances of cultural and literary critic Camille Paglia and alternative rockers Dean and Gene Ween. Even then none of the jokes have any bite, which is rather depressing since gender norms are a prime material to sharpen one's teeth on. Worse, some of the film's jokes either don't make any sense – one gag has Kyle believing he finally has proof that Pat is male from seeing his silhouette in the bathroom, but its effectiveness depends on how much you believe that someone would typically pour expired orange juice into their toilet – or are variations of the old “Characters are on the verge of revealing important information, but something or someone gets in the way of the audience's POV or prevents a character from saying anything” stunt.

So, my grandmother would ask, don't you have anything nice to say? Well, the set design is surprisingly creative, with Pat living in an apartment complex torn right from the 1950s, although if the sets are the most imaginative part of a film, then pointing it out is something of a backhanded compliment. The cameo by Camille Paglia is genuinely funny, with Paglia gently mocking her own persona. Now that I think about it, a brief cameo and the sets really were the only really good parts of this film. Maybe a film based ultimately on one joke was doomed from the moment the scriptwriter started typing, but the – dare I say it – broader issues of gender and sexuality that the movie skirts on might have given the filmmakers something to mine for. Instead the film's one contribution is a historical lesson in the history of comedy films, on how much you can really get out of so little.

Cast Connections

Most aren't all that surprising, since It's Pat had a fairly high-profile cast, but you might recognize Mitch Pileggi, best known for his role as Walter Skinner on "The X-Files", as one of the guards at Ween's concert