Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. This time we’re looking at everyone’s favorite Tom Green film, Freddy Got Fingered, nominee for eight Razzies, winner of five, and guarantor that Tom Green would direct no future movies.
1990 was, as things go, a pretty okay year to be born. I have seen wonderful things, though I missed a few things I wish I’d been able to experience. But I’ve decided that one of the most underrated things about having 1990 as a birth year is that, by virtue of being a few years too young, I completely missed direct exposure to the Era of Tom Green.
Tom Green, for the rest of you blessed enough to have missed his era, is…how to describe Tom Green, exactly? He’s Canadian, so those of us down south don’t have to accept responsibility for him, at least. He started his career as a standup comedian in comedy clubs in the suburbs of Ottawa. He did a brief stint in the early 1990s as a rapper. But what he was really famous for, and what got him splattered all across the television screens of North America, was The Tom Green Show. The Tom Green Show lived quietly on Canadian public-access TV until the Comedy Network picked it up in 1997, followed by MTV in 1999 for an American run.
How respectable.
Full disclosure, I have never watched an episode of The Tom Green Show, nor will I be doing so now, because some things are above my pay grade. But the premise of The Tom Green Show appears to have been that we, the public, would enjoy watching Tom Green engage in such witty antics as throwing baby dolls at cars on the highway, painting a lesbian sex scene on the hood of his father’s car, planting the severed head of a cow in his parents’ bed, following around his co-host Glenn Humplik and demanding that Humplik urinate for the camera, or singing about rubbing his buttocks against various objects and nonconsenting creatures.
This premise was correct enough that The Tom Green Show became one of MTV’s top offerings during its run until Green had to undergo treatment for testicular cancer. By 2001, he was one of the most popular comedians on television, riding that urine-tainted wave of mean-spirited shock-jock humor that eventually crested with the birth of Jackass. In 2000, he made his feature film debut with a supporting role in the successful Todd Phillips sex comedy Road Trip. And someone over at New Regency and 20th Century Fox decided that they ought to capitalize on his popularity by giving him several million dollars and letting him make a movie with it. And thus was born today’s object of fascination, a strange and surreal alleged work of comedy called Freddy Got Fingered.
I hate typing out that phrase even more than I hated typing out “Ghosts Can’t Do It.”
To what should have been no one’s surprise, mainstream critics and non-MTV audiences did not care for Freddy Got Fingered. Roger Ebert famously gave it zero stars and said that it “was not the bottom of the barrel…[it] does not deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as barrels.” In theaters, it barely made back its budget. The Razzies showered it with nominations, and Green (to his credit) became only the second winner in history to show up to the ceremony to collect his awards.
But as sometimes happens with these things, Freddy Got Fingered has received…not exactly a reevaluation, but a growing number of defenders. They insist that it’s a satirical anti-comedy, a send-up of empty big-budget studio comedies of the sort 20th Century and New Regency may have assumed Green would make for them. Green himself still takes pride in the film and insists that more people saw it in theaters than we think. And he’s got a point; it made a killing off video rentals.
So what do we think? Is Freddy Got Fingered one of the misunderstood masterpieces we’re always hoping to find among the Raspberries we pick?
THE STORY
No.
Who could have predicted?
Story? The story, you say? Your guess is as good as mine.
Ugh, fine, I’ll try.
Green plays Gordon Brody, a 28-year-old aspiring cartoonist who very, very briefly moves to Los Angeles from…wherever…to try to pitch his cartoons as a TV show to exactly one big studio boss (Anthony Michael Hall). The boss isn’t convinced, because despite being a moderately talented pencil-sketcher, Gord is also a revolting, juvenile lunatic with several undiagnosed personality disorders.
When we first meet Gord, he appears to be a young man with big dreams heading out into the world for the first time, his parents (Julie Hagerty, debasing herself, and Rip Torn) gifting him a car to commemorate the occasion while his younger brother Freddy (Eddie Kaye Thomas) looks on in jealousy. Gord speeds down the highway without a care in the world, the wind in his hair, until he spots a farm where horses are copulating. He leaps out of his car, grabs the penis of the male horse, and yanks on it eagerly while screaming “I’m a farmer, Daddy!”
No, I’m not going to show you that. Jesus Christ.
This early moment is welcome, because it tells you exactly what kind of movie you’re about to watch, and whether that kind of movie is going to be to your taste at all. After Gord fails to sell a TV pitch in LA, he moves back home with his parents, while Freddy becomes a successful and well-adjusted middle manager. Gord’s relationship with his father Jim, who considers his son a good-for-nothing idiot loser, deteriorates to the point that Gord accuses Jim of having sexually abused Freddy during a family therapy session. Thus the title.
The rest of the movie is about Gord’s vaguely-defined dual quest to achieve success with his cartoons and make his father proud, except that of course it’s not really about that. It’s about Gord engaging in Tom Green Show-style antics that can be all the more shocking and extreme and disgusting for being scripted and having access to a special effects budget, such as:
- Gord licking an open wound after his best friend Darren (Harland Williams) rips his knee open on a homemade skate ramp;
- Gord delivering a baby, biting its umbilical cord, and swinging it around his head like a cowboy’s lasso to make it cry;
- Gord staggering around a rural highway while wearing the bloody carcass of a stag;
- Gord developing a relationship with a nurse and amateur rocket scientist named Betty (Marisa Coughlan), who has a caning fetish and wants nothing in the world more than to give Gord oral sex as often as she possibly can;
- Gord plunking away at a piano with a bunch of breakfast sausages tied to his fingers;
- Gord repeating the horse stunt from earlier, but with an elephant, and drenching Jim with the elephant’s semen;
- Jim wiggling his wrinkly derriere at us and yelling “fuck me” for the longest twenty-five seconds of the audience’s life;
- A neighborhood child named Andy (Connor Widdows) being subjected to increasingly bloody and should-be-fatal accidents, culminating in his being sliced and diced by helicopter blades, because if there’s one thing that always makes me slap my thighs, it’s being reminded of the Twilight Zone disaster.
If you want to hear more, that’s why the Good Lord gave you TV Tropes.
I had to see this, so now you must too.
THE BAD
Freddy Got Fingered’s major sin is not being gross, offensive, shocking, repulsive, or tasteless. It’s not that juvenile or stupid, either. Oh no, Freddy Got Fingered’s major sin is far, far worse than any of those: it’s dull.
Seriously, that’s the movie’s biggest problem. Pink Flamingos is everything I just mentioned and more, but it’s also compelling and watchable because it gets us invested in the bunch of scary lunatics who make up its ensemble. Freddy Got Fingered has no time to waste on such niceties, because then we might have to cut valuable seconds of elephant jizz. You react the same way you would to stepping in dog doo-doo. You’re not offended or shocked; you’re just a little grossed out and a lot ticked off. Freddy Got Fingered is the cinematic equivalent of stepping in dog doo-doo for 87 straight minutes.
Green makes the same mistake that Harmony “Trash Humpers” Korine, Thierry “Vase de noces” Zéno, Jörg “Nekromantik” Buttgereit, Lucifer “Slaughtered Vomit Dolls” Valentine, Joel M. “Bloodsucking Freaks” Reed, and everyone else from the John Waters Wannabe School of 4chan Message Board Filmmaking makes every single time without fail. They do not understand what it means to shock someone. True shock requires an emotional connection and investment. Your granny is shocked when you say bad words because she still sees you as a chubby-cheeked toddler and cannot reconcile that with the foul-mouthed commoner you’ve become. When some slack-jawed, dead-eyed nincompoop on my TV screen is masturbating an elephant or humping a trash can or raping a pig, that isn’t shocking, because I don’t care. I certainly do not care enough to read it as a metaphor for consumerism or capitalism or the director’s strained relationship with his parents or whatever. It’s merely annoying and gross, and I want them to stop doing it, or at minimum do it somewhere else.
The only thing shocking here is the level of dedication on the part of the props team to whatever this is.
Ah, but my beefs with Freddy Got Fingered do not end with its themes! Let us consider also the performances. Rip Torn as the Freudian-caricature Brody patriarch Jim has accepted the kind of movie he is in and commits to it. Poor Julie Hagerty has not and does not, and neither does Eddie Kaye Thomas in the film’s most thankless and nonsensical role. Thomas plays every scene with the same dazed, baffled look on his face, like he thinks he might have arrived at the wrong film set.
Also, weirdly for a movie that is so frantic and pushy, the pacing constantly feels off. Every shot and joke lingers for too long, though how much too long ranges from “a second or two” to “sweet holy Jesus why is this still happening.” The closest the movie got to making me smile was near the end of its fluffy runtime, when a sign can be spotted in a crowd that reads “WHEN THE FUCK IS THIS MOVIE GOING TO END,” but admitting you have done a bad thing is still worse than not doing the bad thing in the first place.
Rip Torn, contemplating the career choices that led him here.
The champions of Freddy Got Fingered have a point. A lot of modern comedies are godawful, Tom Green. My question is why I ought then to watch your movie, which simply compounds and multiplies that rot by adding to the number of awful movies in the world, instead of doing a different activity. Watching a good movie, for example.
THE GOOD
Now I feel like Paul Hollywood with Mary Berry at my elbow, prodding me to “go on, say something nice.” Fine. A short list of things Freddy Got Fingered did right:
The animation in Zebras in America, the cartoon show that Gord eventually sells to Boss Anthony Michael Hall, is fine as a parody of late-’90s adult cartoons. The “plot” is even more off-putting and incomprehensible than the plot of Freddy Got Fingered at large, but that’s late-’90s adult cartoons for you.
Possibly a show already on Adult Swim.
I do not enjoy the dynamic between Gord and Jim Brody, but I can imagine, and be at peace with the idea of, viewers who do. Both Green and Torn have a blast at everyone else’s expense, and you’re a strong soul indeed if you can resist all the boundless enthusiasm in their performances. The sausage scene is not enjoyable to watch, but based on how difficult it is for Torn to not crack up throughout it, it must have been enjoyable to film. Adding joy to the world is a good thing, right?
As both actor and director, Green’s love for this project is palpable. In contrast to the directors of movies like Inchon and The Lonely Lady, who might as well have been hostages, he fills every frame of this film with personality, with unadulterated Essence of Tom Green. The sets are obnoxiously bright, cluttered, and chaotic; the action shots have tried to recreate the haphazard and unplanned feeling of Tom Green Show sketches as closely as a scripted thing can. It’s a deeply unpleasant and uninteresting personality, but hey, it’s a personality, and that’s not as low a bar as it should be for a movie released by a major studio in 2001.
And then there’s the one element of the movie on which I will actually cast my lot with the defenders: Marisa Coughlan’s Betty, the only character who works on a level beyond a glorified dick joke. While Coughlan’s fork-in-a-garbage-disposal laugh is in keeping with the rest of Freddy Got Fingered’s hostile aesthetic, she also has a disarming sweetness to her that feels like it wandered in from some other film. Her line readings on Betty’s repeated insistence to Gord that she “just want[s] to suck [his] cock” border on genuine romance. Her character’s otherwise rich and fulfilling life combines with her obsessive devotion to fellating a monstrously unappealing man into the one part of Green’s purported satire of modern comedy movies that works.
The only thing in the movie more charming than it looks.
I wish none of it worked, though. In many ways, I wish Tom Green were worse at his job. I wish I could dismiss Freddy Got Fingered as the logical endpoint of a drooling moron who got hold of a movie camera. But I can’t, because he’s not. He has a vision, a style, and a sense of purpose to his movie. If he didn’t, maybe the movie would offer some of the giddy joy that can come from true cinematic ineptitude. But he does have those things. They’re just dumb and bad.
There are people – some of you perhaps among them – who see artistry, even genius, in movies like Freddy Got Fingered. I am not one of them. I do not consider shamelessness a form of talent. I congratulate Green on cashing in his popularity to give 20th Century Fox and Regency Pictures big old wedgies, but my admiration for his project ends there. At the end of the day, I do not want to watch grown men conduct extended experiments in teenage edgelordery. I confess to being one of those prissy, prudish fuddy-duddies who was happier before I watched Tom Green pretend to spray Rip Torn with gallons of elephant semen.
But you know what? If this is your jam, then I’m happy for you that we live in a world where movies get made for you too. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Yours just happens to be wrong.
Quality of Movie: 2 / 5. The concept of visual storytelling is, unfortunately, far from foreign to Freddy Got Fingered.
Quality of Experience: ½ / 5. You may attempt to disgust me, but boring the pants off me while doing so is beyond the pale.
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.