Freddy Got Fingered
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 I can't change the channel? No, NOOOOOOO...
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Freddy Got Fingered is a 2001 American black comedy film directed, co-written by, and starring Tom Green.
Plot
Gordon, a 28-year-old aspiring animator, leaves his home in Oregon to sell his ideas to Hollywood. After being (correctly) told that they are possibly the stupidest ideas ever and that he needs to spend time rethinking them, he moves back home. But his father, never a kind man, escalates his mean treatment of his rather unconventional son. Meanwhile, Gord has fallen for Betty, an attractive doctor at the hospital where his friend is staying; she happens to use a wheelchair and delights in having her paralyzed legs beaten with a bamboo cane; her sexual aggression intimidates him. Gord's family goes to a psychiatrist, and he lies to her that his father molests Gord's brother, Freddy; Gord neglects to mention that Freddy is 25. Soon, Gord has the house to himself, and comes up with an award-winning animated series, "Zebras in America", based on his own family.
All this is really a framework on which Tom Green hangs his usual crazy stunts, which he commonly did in The Tom Green Show.
Why It Intentionally Got Fingered and Can't Change the Channel
Note: Since Tom Green wanted a Razzie Award, it's possible to say that this film was intentionally bad.
- For starters, the film has very gross scenes, animal abuse, sexual jokes, outrageous scenes, and vulgar violent content.
- The scene where Gord plays with a horse's penis and says, "Look at me, Daddy, I'm a farmer!" is cringeworthy, horrendous, and atrociously fueled with bestiality. The same thing can be said when he plays with an elephant's penis... and he makes it ejaculate all over him and his father, Jim.
- The scene where Gord helps deliver a baby is disgusting and horrifying, especially when he bites of the umbilical cord and swings it around for fun. Nice one, Gordon.
- There are lots of penis jokes involving sausages.
- The acting is bad and hammy, but Tom Green's acting as Gord is just flat-out abysmal.
- Speaking of Gord, his character is nothing more than an embarrassment in Tom Green's career, ranging from universally mortifying actions Gord makes to his horrible hammy acting by his portrayal of acting like a degenerative manchild with a sociopathic streak.
- Poorly written story and dialogue.
- Multiple unlikable characters in the film:
- Gord is very childish and extremely unlikable.
- Gord's father, Jim, is also an unlikable character. Who can be considered far more unlikable than Gord, who is unrealistically violent, short-tempered, and trigger-happy, especially for a cliché of being the "not proud father."
- Betty comes off as an ableist stereotype and seems rather weird for a love interest, evident when she finds delight in the scene when Gord whacks her legs with a cane. This is not the only ableism in the movie, as slurs and stereotypes are often tossed around carelessly.
- The humor is feeble and tries too hard to be funny. One example is the "Backwards Man" scene.
- Flat characterization, especially with Gord.
- The poster for this movie looks ridiculous.
- Gord tends to say things twice, which is excruciating and annoying (e.g., "You hear the funny sounds? You hear the funny sounds? It's my hooves. It's my hooves.")
- The cartoons that Gord drew, while drawn well, are very poorly animated.
- The running gag that sees a boy repeatedly getting injured and eventually killed in increasingly gory fashion is possibly one of the cruelest gags to ever be put into a film.
- The title not only sounds very inappropriate and laughable but is also misleading, given Freddy is only in the film for about 5 minutes and doesn't get sexually assaulted. The film focuses on Gord pursuing his dream to be a cartoonist.
- Disturbing ending: The kid gets chopped to bits by an airplane propeller but soon says he's okay.
- There is another disturbing scene where the children are all inside the institute, with the children wandering around with cartoony music playing and watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In fact, Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn was initially fired for tweeting scenes like this.
Redeeming Qualities
- The "Zebras in America" scene and the Gibberish Guy's yelling are the only good jokes.
- At the end of the movie, there is a hysterical sight gag where a sign reads, "WHEN THE F**K IS THIS MOVIE GOING TO END?!"
- Decently made soundtrack.
- There is a "PG cut" on the VHS and DVD, and despite only lasting for three minutes, it's much funnier and eliminates almost everything inappropriate about the movie.
Reception
The film was heavily panned upon release and is considered by many to be one of the worst films ever made. It currently holds a 11% "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes with a critic consensus stating, "Unfavorably comparing it with such infamously bad titles as Battlefield Earth, a significant number of critics are calling Tom Green's extreme gross-out comedy the worst movie they have ever seen." On Metacritic, based on 25 reviews, it holds a 13/100, meaning "overwhelming dislike". Roger Ebert named it his worst film of 2001, awarded the film a zero-star rating and stated in his review "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." His co-critic, Richard Roeper stated that Tom Green was a poor comedian and later added that he "should be flipping burgers somewhere." The Toronto Star gave this movie a one-time negative one star out of five.
The film also effectively killed the gross-out comedy genre that had hitherto been quite popular at the tail-end of the 90s. However, over the time the film has gained a cult following, with some commentators interpreting satirical and metahumorous themes within the film's gross-out gags and has earned some critical re-evaluation.
Box Office
Freddy Got Fingered opened at #5 on its opening weekend with a domestic gross of $7,098,459. The total domestic gross would later be $14,254,993. In overseas markets, it made $78,259. Overall, the film made $14,333,252 against its $14 million budget and was labeled a box office bomb despite earning slightly more than its budget. Despite failing at the box office, the film did better on VHS and DVD.
Awards and nominations
The film won five Golden Raspberry Awards out of eight nominations including Worst Picture and it also won a Worst Picture Award at the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association Awards.
Trivia
- On March 22, 2016, James Meyers, from Concord, North Carolina, was arrested on an outstanding warrant for failing to return a VHS copy of Freddy Got Fingered that had been borrowed in 2002 from a now-defunct video rental store. Tom Green offered to pay the related fines, if they were not "an outrageous sum".
- In a November 2017 interview, Tom Green stated that one of the reasons why his film failed was because more people were purchased tickets for Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles and then snuck in to see his film. The problem with this theory is that not many people saw that film either.
- This was Tom Green's first and only film as a writer and a director.
- This is Phantomstrider's least favorite film, and he considers this movie as the absolute worst movie of all time, perhaps even worse than The Room and The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. He ranked it number 1 on his "Top 10 Worst Movies of All Time" video.
- The infamous scene where Gord ties sausages hanging from the celling to his fingers, plays the piano badly, and sings "Daddy, would you like some sausages?" became a popular internet meme.
Videos
External Links
Freddy Got Fingered at the Internet Movie Database
Freddy Got Fingered on Rotten Tomatoes
Freddy Got Fingered on Metacritic
Freddy Got Fingered on Letterboxd
Comments
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