'Candy' is still comic, but bigger isn't better

In ``Strangers With Candy," Amy Sedaris brings to the movies Jerri Blank -- her dim, slutty, dentally challenged, omnisexual 46-year-old ex-junkie, ex-hooker, ex-con. And while I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth (even one with teeth this bad), there are moments when I wondered why she bothered.

Sedaris's defunct After School Special satire didn't merely bare teeth. It had fangs. (No more dental references, I promise!) The movie, which Sedaris wrote with fellow Strangers Stephen Colbert and Paul Dinello, is up to no good, but it doesn't leave you appalled at yourself for laughing, which the show so deftly did. At almost 90 minutes, it's a vamp and a goof, with flashy cameos from such folks as Allison Janney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Sarah Jessica Parker.

In a brief preface, the movie introduces Jerri as she returns to her family's home after 16 AWOL years. Her mother has died. Her father (Dan Hedaya) has remarried and fallen into a coma. If Jerri can make daddy proud, maybe he'll wake up. To that end, the prodigal daughter re-enrolls in high school, ditching her prostitute duds for vests, turtlenecks, and horrid fringed jeans. And soon the comic juices start flowing.

Jerri's new public school will lose its funding unless the corrupt principal, Onyx Blackman (Greg Hollimon), can prove there is intelligent life somewhere in his student body. Needless to say, Jerri doesn't make the grade. ``What's your IQ?" he asks. ``Pisces," she says. Principal Blackman settles on attempting to win a science fair, the very one the incompetent science teacher, Chuck Noblet (Colbert), has just told his students they have almost no time to enter.

Blackman hires an outside guru (Matthew Broderick) to ensure the school's success , and he takes the popular kids . Stuck with a team that includes Jerri, Noblet is crushed. He's also heartbroken that his secret boyfriend, the flaky art teacher (Dinello), has defected to the other science crew's camp.

Sedaris is brutally crass through it all, slouching, cursing, and lobbing ethnic slurs wherever she can. You could cut glass with her timing. She's concocted a very funny one-of-a-kind creation: a horny, pea-brained cavewoman. Under Dinello's direction, the rest of the series' regular cast is having as much fun, although Deborah Rush, who plays Jerri's sour stepmom, seems dulled here. And Colbert, who has become a media star since the show ended five years ago, does his nincompoop narcissist shtick too well. You almost pity Mr. Noblet.

But without its TV context, ``Strangers With Candy " is aimless. The show, among other things, had a mocking distrust of the After School Special's lesson-mongering clichés. It winked, for instance, in anticipation of commercial breaks, and it broke through the genre's painful earnestness by soiling the obvious lines of right and wrong. On TV, this was campy, sure-handed, and uncomfortably funny.

Aside from its jabs at the adult dysfunction that runs amok in our public schools, the movie fails to make the same point. It doesn't have anything to tackle. Jerri's racism and ribaldry, however riotous, aren't that different from Hollywood's. The show's brilliant conceit seems mild. In its own way, this is just another teen movie.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.