Freddy Got Fingered (DVD)

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In the years that I´ve been doing reviews for DVDTown, I have never given a movie a "1" rating. I´ve never had to; I´ve never seen anything that bad. Oh, some have come close, like the unrated "Caligula" and the low-budget "Children Shouldn´t Play With Dead Things." Yet, even they had a certain scabrous charm that prevented me from condemning them with a full "1" treatment. Then came 2001´s "Freddy Got Fingered."

Now, understand, I try to avoid other people´s film reviews before I have a chance to watch something for myself. I try to remain unbiased, try to keep my mind open, but with this movie I could hardly avoid overhearing what others had to say. Even some of my students at school couldn´t pass up the opportunity of knocking it. Nevertheless, nothing prepared me for the sheer awfulness of this film. Its unadulterated repugnancy, its complete and absolute obnoxiousness, is really quite hard to describe. Aiming its material at the lowest possible denominator, "Freddy Got Fingered" is not just the bottom of the barrel, it´s the putrid, festering decay lying beneath the barrel. Oh, and lest I forget to tell you, it´s supposed to be a comedy.

Tom Green, the TV guy you may have seen in "Road Trip" and "Charlie´s Angels," wrote, directed, and starred in this stinker, so anything that went wrong, and that is literally everything, can be blamed on him. OK, I can understand a studio investing their total trust in an experienced cinema auteur like Woody Allen, but why would any studio give the green light to something so bad by someone so untested? And why wouldn´t a studio have kept tabs on what the man was doing? I mean, decent production values aside, this thing looks like a gang of seventh graders put it together as a gross-out gag, without rehearsals.

Anyway, Green plays a weird, simpleminded, unemployed cartoonist named Gord Brody, who lives with parents in the basement of their home. He´s twenty-eight years old and has never held a job. Sounds like an old roommate I once had. Rip Torn plays his father, Jim, an unimaginably crude and moronic character who is almost but not quite as repulsive as his son. Julie Hagerty plays his mother, Julie (how imaginative), a wilting violet most of the time.

Gord´s ambition is to go to Hollywood and sell his cartoons to an animation factory that will turn them into a million-dollar franchise. Fat chance, but his dad buys him a car and aims him in the right direction, just to get him out of the house. Once in Hollywood, in order to get to see a studio boss he tells everyone he´s there to inform the boss that his wife has just died. Some fun. The boss, Dave Davidson, is played by Anthony Michael Hall, presumably slumming for a job. The boss´s receptionist is played by Green´s flame, Drew Barrymore, presumably as a favor. Davidson tells Gord his cartoon creation, X-Ray Cat, is dumb and unfunny, which admirably sums up this movie as well. He tells him to "get inside the animals," so Gord finds a dead deer in the road, butchers it, and runs around in its skin. Then he gets hit by a truck. Regrettably, Gord lives.

These are the jokes; I kid you not. Green seems fascinated by copulating animals and their body parts--especially horses, even elephants--and at the sight of a pair of horses coupling on a stud farm he darts around screaming and waving his arms like a wild man. Then he runs over a little boy in his new car, and his friend Darren (Harland Williams) breaks his leg. I tell you, the fun never stops.

Marisa Coughlan plays a pretty, perky young nurse named Betty that he meets and dates. In her spare time she´s a rocket scientist. Why would a smart, beautiful girl date a complete jerk? Well, she´s confined to a wheelchair, which gives Green the opportunity to do some really exciting jokes about the handicapped and to show us some vulgar, kinky sex. She loves having her paralyzed legs beaten with a stick, you see, and the rest of their activity is unprintable.