Originally released April 20, 2001:

The beauty of Tom Green (if you’ll call it such) works in the realm of television. His bizarre humor and meddling nuisance on the streets worked in a “Can’t believe he’s doing this” way. He thrives in this environment where he can wreck havoc amongst the unknowing. Take him out of this environment into a scripted venture where people are acting against him, and the reality is killed along with why it was funny in the first place. It’s not so much funny that Tom Green can hump dead animals on camera, it’s funny that he’ll do it in front of bystanders.

As it stands, Freddy Got Fingered is plot-less. It is basically Green doing one weird and bizarre antic after another with little relation to anything. It’s basically a meandering mess, almost like an abstract artist’s work if that artist were insane. Freddy Got Fingered is Green’s attempt at cinematic gross-out stardom. Sure, he does things that would be considered in poor taste but they are scripted and lose their appeal. Green guts an animal and wears its skin like a poncho, he bites the umbilical cord, he even eroticizes a horse and aids in its… release. But all the charm is gone when it’s Green just doing zany things in a closed environment. What is the fun of seeing people do scripted reactions to Green’s antics? He needs to be in the real world, he needs to piss people off, he NEEDS reality. A movie will do no justice to Tom Green and this one surely does not.

Nate’s Grade: F

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

Freddy Got Fingered was comedian Tom Green’s only movie that he ever wrote and/or directed. It was his only starring vehicle after several relatively memorable supporting roles in 2000 movies like Charlie’s Angels and Road Trip. It was the most creative freedom and the biggest budget that the absurdist provocateur who began on Canadian public access and became an MTV star would ever earn. When it was released in the spring of 2001, Green was on the cover of Entertainment Weekly with the headline, “The New King of Comedy.” It all feels like another world, like a half-remembered memory, like looking at an old photo of yourself in a hairstyle that makes you cringe today, and you say, “Oh yeah, that was a popular thing… for some godforsaken reason.” In some ways, Green trail-blazed the idiosyncratic, anti-humor brand of fringe comedy that found a welcomed cult following from Adult Swim and Internet culture. He seems ahead of his time in some ways and yet also completely out of time today. It’s hard to imagine a comedian like Green having the same sort of zeitgeist-tapping reach he had during his MTV talk show where he would test the patience of strangers and harass his saintly parents. His shtick was being weird and confrontational and reminded people of the legendary Andy Kaufman (I too question whether Kaufman could thrive in today’s irony-saturated new media environment). Green was unabashedly different and during the turn of the century felt potentially exciting and new, and then he quickly wore out his welcome when we all realized there wasn’t really a joke behind the joke. Sometimes a guy yelling the same word repeatedly is just an unfunny lunatic who shouldn’t be given a preposterous $14 million dollar budget to splurge.

Judging by the critical reception of Freddy Got Fingered, you would think Green had committed a cinematic hate crime. Roger Ebert wrote, “This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.” Variety wrote, “One of the most brutally awful comedies to ever emerge from a major studio.” The Washington Post called it a “horror film.” The New York Post claimed it qualified as “cruel and unusual punishment.” The most wincing take came from The Austin Chronicle, which wrote, “Green, who looks like a chinless, hollow-eyed pederast at the best of times, is simply out of his league here.” It won five Razzie Awards including Worst Film, Worst Actor, and Worst Director, all of which Green appeared in person to accept, where he then delivered a kazoo performance so long that they literally had to pull him off the stage. The fact that Freddy Got Fingered has developed a mild cult following in the years since and been hailed as a Dada-esque experimental comedy. Some have theorized that it was all one big joke on the studio. I don’t know. That reclamation seems like projection for larger meaning that Green typically eschews. I cannot tell if he is deliberately trying to make a good bad movie or a bad good movie. Either way, twenty years later, Freddy Got Fingered is the same regrettably noxious and obnoxious experiment it was back in 2001.

It’s hard to classify the 87 odd minutes as a movie. It’s relatively plot-less and hung together on the flimsy premise of 28-year-old man-child Gord (Green) wanting to become an animator with his cartoons. There’s nothing that would be classified as characterization or arcs. In fact, very little has relevance beyond the immediacy. It’s a movie of inconsequential ephemera. Comedies are built upon subversion but also the reliable setup-payoff development. There are some running jokes here, notably a small child who continuously gets viciously hurt. I don’t exactly know what the joke is here because the suffering is so accentuated, like the kid spitting a mouthful of blood. There’s another character, a friend of Gord’s, who has the exact same running joke, where he too keeps suffering calamitous injuries, and that’s all he provides. Why have two supporting characters who only serve to be butts of the exact same kind of joke? It’s redundant. The closest thing the film has to a character arc literally involves Gord beginning the movie, at minute seven mind you, by masturbating a horse, and it concludes with Gord masturbating an elephant. He did transition to a larger animal to manually masturbate over the course of those 87 arduous minutes.

No one was expecting anything resembling high art for Green’s filmmaking debut, but one would hope for more than a vapid gross-out vomitorium. I’ve written it several times before but there’s a distinct difference between gross-out and gross-out humor. Take that opening moment where Gord literally leaps out of his car to run over to a horse and touch its wobbling member. He excitedly shakes it and screams, “Look at me now, daddy,” but his father, played by Emmy and Oscar-nominated actor Rip Torn (Men in Black, The Larry Sanders Show), is nowhere. What is the joke here? What is the context for this to be funny rather than off-putting? What is the context for humor when Gord skins a dead deer and wears its pelt, gyrating on the ground and muttering to himself? What is the context for humor where Gord delivers a woman’s baby, bites the umbilical cord with his own teeth, swings the newborn baby around the room, and then tapes the umbilical cord to his own belly and when his date finds it he says, offhandedly, “It’s just for fun”? For much of the protracted, punishing runtime, there simply are not jokes. There are bizarre antics that might make you retch or cover your eyes but there aren’t actual jokes. Seeing Gord dressed in a scuba outfit in the shower isn’t a joke. Seeing Gord dress his clothes backwards and repeatedly hum, “The backwards man,” isn’t a joke. Seeing Gord wave a sausage around his own genitals isn’t a joke. Having the female love interest, Betty (Marissa Coughlin), plead with Gord to violently strike her paralyzed legs with a bamboo rod until she climaxes isn’t a joke. These are ideas, at best, and lacking any suitable comedic legwork. It’s like a Mad Libs scenario that wasn’t completed. It feels like Green might be aware of his own comedy shortcomings so he just structured his movie with tiresome and nauseating asides.

Gord is also a thoroughly repulsive human being. He is the villain of this dreadful movie, the cause of mass suffering and annoyance for every lost soul stuck in the purgatory of interacting with this cretin. I don’t know Green’s level of self-awareness with anything he does. Does he view the character of Gord as a lovable underdog seeking out his dreams? Does he view Gord as a hero in a world of compromise and conformity? Gord is a despicable human being that only lives to torment and harass those around him. The very beginning of the movie Gord’s family warmly greets him, gives him a new car, and wish him well as he heads to Los Angeles to pursue his dreams. What a bunch of irredeemable assholes, right? His father is Gord’s biggest antagonist throughout and yet you feel the old man is justified in his reoccurring anger and disappointment. His son is a dangerous lunatic. At one point, Gord blithely accuses his father of molesting his adult brother Freddy (Eddie Kaye Thomas) and, for whatever reason, the state takes this man’s word as gospel (this is where the title even comes from). The brother is thrown into foster care, his mother leaves his father, and this is never resolved. The story wants to have a late father-son reconciliation, right after the father is literally blasted with elephant semen, and is the joke that something so inconceivable is even being attempted under the ridiculous circumstances? I found myself often sympathizing with the father and with Torn the actor, both of whom had to put up with so much nonsense. He’s the persistent foil for Gord and Green’s persistent madness and watching him pull his pants down and scream at his son to live up to his words and assault him just made me feel sad. This whole movie made me feel depressed for everyone onscreen and for the many indie movies that could have been birthed from Green’s $14 million budget. When the executives read the finished script, if there was an actual script, what exactly won their approval? Was it the torrential elephant semen?

Freddie Got Fingered is less a movie than an endurance test. If you considered yourself a nominal fan of Green’s TV antics, maybe there was some appeal. If you’re a fan of the bizarre, maybe there was some appeal. If you’re a fan of an artist possibly sticking it to his studio bosses, maybe there was some appeal. I didn’t see the appeal in 2001 and I still don’t see the appeal to this day. My initial review was more charitable for a film that eventually earned my Worst of the Year title. Back in my teenage days, I was a fan of Green and even taped his show on MTV. I enjoyed the awkward discomfort he forced upon others in his interviews and pranks, but when you place that in a scripted realm, it just becomes excess upon excess, finding new ways to sink to new bottoms. I think it was only a matter of time for Green’s merry prankster shtick to grow tired. Repeating a word 100 times doesn’t seem to make it funnier (Family Guy seems to have taken the wrong notes). One interview with Martin Short just amounted to Green putting bacon strips on his head. Watch enough of the man in his element and you begin to realize the emperor has no clothes. There isn’t really a point to anything, and if that’s the point, in a torturous Dada explanation, then why even bother making any art at all? Freddie Got Fingered is no unfairly maligned, misunderstood masterpiece, no daring act of performance art. It’s unparalleled self-indulgence from an artist that had nothing to say and nothing to do even at the height of his career.

Re-View Grade: F

Plug: Check out the “Saturday Night Jive” podcast, recorded in 2015, where my pals Ben and George try and make any sense of this movie. It’s a good listen, much funnier than Green’s movie, and I agreed with all major points.