Freddy got Fingered is literally the absolute worst movie ever

The BBQ Pit
1

I tortured myself the other day, when an acquaintance downloaded a pirated copy of the recent Tom Green movie Freddie Got Fingered. No, I am not dumb enough to actually spend money to see this travesty. I was forewarned. I was told how bad it was, and how good movies such as Leprechaun IV and Battlefield Earth were in comparison. But I was curious. I figured that it might be possible to laugh at the badness of the movie.

I was wrong. It had no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Casablanca has long been my favorite example of a movie where every detail was handled in such a way as to add to the experience of seeing it. This movie was the opposite. Every single detail&emdash;yes, absolutely every single one, from plot twists to camera angles&emdash;made this movie all that much more painful to watch. Real mental anguish was suffered trying to comprehend how anyone could have allowed this monstrosity to exist.

At the end of it, my jaw was simply hanging open in sheer amazement at the horribleness of what I had seen.

Anyways, for a bit of a synopsis of what happened (you could call this a spoiler warning, but giving away the ending couldn’t possibly spoil this movie any more). Tom Green’s character is a moron cartoonist, who acts like, well, Tom Green, except that in the movie he doesn’t have the motivation of getting paid for doing it or anything. This gets tiresome and stupid in a matter of seconds. He’s living at home with his parents in Portland, Oregon.

As the movie starts, he gets a job in LA at a cheese sandwich factory, where he again acts like Tom Green. On the way there, he stops for no apparent reson to masturbate a horse. Now I’m not opposed on principle to watching this, if it was a joke or something. But, no, he’s just driving by, seems a turgid horse, and decides to give it a hand. This is only the first of several disgusting and disturbing things he does for no reason whatsoever.

In LA, he tries selling his stupid cartoons, gets turned down, drives back home, and along the way decides to skin a dear deer and wear its skin in the middle of the road, again, for no reason other than to put something more disturbing onto the screen. When he gets back home, there is a scene where he licks his friend’s open wound, again, for no reason, and another where he delivers a baby, biting the umbelicle cord off and swinging it around splashing blood everywhere, again for no fucking reason.

Somewhere along the line he meets a woman in a wheelchair who dabbles in rocket science, wnats only to suck Tom Greens dick, and gets off on being hit in the legs with a bamboo stick. And of course there are several more episodes of Tom Green acting like Tom Green, which by this point is so annoying that you hope your eyes start bleeding painfully to keep you from watching.

Much is made of Tom Green’s relationship with his father, played by Rip Torn. While I suspect that we are supposed to sympathize with Tom Green’s character, that would be impossible to do without a lobotomy or two. I personally found it more amazing that anyone would allow someone who constantly acted like Tom Green to live into adulthood and remain sane. After a particularly ugly incident at a restaurant, where the father exposes him lying to his girlfriend (the amateur rocket scientist), Tom Green’s character tells a therapist that his father fingers his younger brother (Freddie, hence the movie title) who is 25.

Whether this is supposed to be funny is beyond me. Actually, by this point in the movie, I’m wondering what the word funny means. Anyways, after more disturbing and pointless incidents, and more of Tom Green acting like Tom Green, some sort of moral is inserted into the movie. Basically, it says to follow your dreams regardless of whether or not they have any chance of success, or even if they’re really stupid. Or something.

So, inspired by his girlfriend’s success at building a rocket powered wheelchair, Tom Green heads back to LA and manages to sell an incredibly moronic and annoying cartoon for a million dollars. Which he then proceeds to spend in renting a helicopter (for no discernable reason), buying his girlfriend a bunch of jewels (again, there is no logical reason for this), and getting revenge on his father.

Rather than any sort of logical revenge, he drugs his father, has the bedroom of the house removed, and placed on a truck in Pakistan (perhaps the truck drove from Oregon to Pakistan, it wouldn’t surprise me). Then they get in a fight, and Tom Green jacks off an elephant onto his father. Then there’s some nonsense about them being held hostage for a few months, and they get released, and that’s that.

I was kind of hoping that they would provide those little blurbs about what happened afterwards, just to limit the chance of a sequel, but that didn’t happen.

I assure you all that as bad as it sounds, the movie itself takes this basic plot and makes it so much worse than it has to be. For example, I could imagine masturbating a horse being funny, or at least bearable. In this movie, it is simply disturbing, wrong, stupid, and annoying.

I think Roger Ebert put it best when he said something to the effect of “this movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel; this movie isn’t even worthy of being mentioned in the same sentence as barrels”. It was truly that fucking bad. Not just badly done, but a measured torture for the viewer. Freddie Got Fingered sets a new high in the deliberate making of horrible movies. Everybody involved with allowing this crap to reach theaters should be run out of the movie industry. Tom Green should be impaled on a large spike for all to see as a warning to those who might try something similar.

Trust me, you don’t want to see it. There is no enjoyment to be derived from this movie. Your life will be worse off for having seen it.

2

No offense to the OP, but I think my life is worse off for having even read about this movie. No one to blame but myself, though.

3

Hey, the movie was made, I’m just trying to do damage control here. If it keeps people from seeing it, it still won’t make life as good overall as if it had never existed, but that’s not possible at this point. I can’t undo all the damage it caused.

4

Good point. (And just for the record, my post was intended to back up your OP, not to challenge it. Hope my meaning didn’t get lost in the ether.)

5

A link to the Roger Ebert review, in case y’all cared: Freddy Got Fingered

6

Huh. I thought it was pretty much common knowledge that “Tom Green” is synonymous with “Stupefyingly Unentertaining.” It’s also pretty damn depressing that I’m only 25 and already I’m shaking my head and muttering “Kids these days…”

7

Every once in a while, you read a review about a movie and terms like “worst movie ever made” are bandied about. You learn to ignore these comments; you realize they are hyperbole.

Yet, nearly every review I have read for “Freddy Got Fingered” uses this phrase. I think we may actually have a “winner”.

8

[comic book guy]

Worst Movie Ever!

[/comic book guy]

9

Surely it isn’t as bad as Manos, the Hands of Fate, or Space Mutiny?

10

Y’know, Manos gets a lot of glory from Misties, but didja ever see Red Zone Cuba? At least Manos had a semi-coherent plot and only mildly incompetant cinematography.

11

No, I haven’t as of yet.
Still, have you seen Space Mutiny? It is one of my favorite episodes, because Mike and the 'Bots are so funny, but the movie so fucking PAINFUL.

As Mike said, “I’d rather get a table dance from Trent Lott!”

12

It’s not quite the worst ever. Rotten Tomatoes gives Freddy Got Fingered an index score of 10%; of 67 reviews of the movie, 7 were actually positive. By contrast, Battlefield Earth, which is surely one of the worst movies ever, got an index score of 5%, only 4 out of 72 reviews positive.

And yet there are movies that are even more critically scorned: Knock Off, Double Team, Wishmaster, Baby Geniuses, The Juror, Meet the Deedles…and that’s just the recent stuff.

I contend that the worst movie I’ve seen on Mystery Science Theater 3000 was The Beast of Yucca Flats, with The Wild World of Batwoman a close second.

13

Little known fact: The movie Baby Geniuses was directly responsible for the death of Gene Siskel. He had been recovering quite well, started reviewing movies again, then saw this movie and just lost the will to live.

I think I missed Space Mutiny, which I’m guessing was from the Sci-Fi channel days. I saw pretty much every ep when they were on Comedy Central, and bought a few of the video releases, but I only started getting Sci-Fi in my area a fw months ago. Red Zone Cuba was aparently filmed in the same manner that Daedelus built the labyrinth: a bunch of filmmakers working on one project with no knowledge of what the other filmmakers were doing. How else to explain how the movie morphs from a prison break-out, to a fictionalized Bay of Pigs, to The Treasure of Sierra Madre? Also, it appears to star Curly, from the Three Stooges, as the lead heavy. I mean, Wild World of Batwoman and Manos, the Hands of Fate were bad, bad, bad movies, but at least they stared cute girls in their underwear. Red Zone Cuba apparently hired Diane Arbus as Casting Director.

14

Problem with your theory about Red Zone Cuba: the “star”, the guy who looks like Curly after letting himself go for a few decades, is Coleman Francis, the director and writer of the film. So, we have to assume that one guy was in conscious control of the entire abomination. Somehow makes it even more chilling, eh?

Coleman Francis was also responsible for the film I cited as the worst, The Beast of Yucca Flats. While both are horribly bad, I have to give the edge to TBoYF due to its inept sound. I don’t know if Francis hadn’t mastered the art of synchronizing sound with film or what, but no one talks on screen, although there’s plenty of dialog (and narration apparently from Planet Weembo for as much as it has to do with what’s happening on screen). Characters either hide their mouths, are shot from a distance, or Francis shows a shot of Character A while Character B is talking. It’s really, really shoddy.

15

It’s just too bad they don’t make MST3K anymore.

As bad as movies are nowadays, they could have a field day.

16

Regarding Freddy Got Fingered: I present, for your edification, an alternate hypothesis.

17

Well, there’s always The Creeping Terror, which features absolutely no dialogue. Instead, this guy narrates the whole damn thing.

“The sheriff thought it was odd that Old Mr. Johnson had been rendered down to his component atoms, so he decided to talk to Professor Smith. Professor Smith told him that only a creature from outer space could kill a person that way. He described how…” Etc. etc. I think the only time anyone besides the narrator makes a noise is when they stand in one place screaming until the monster finally makes its ponderous way across the screen to eat them.

18

Hmmmm… fascinating. (But part of me says, “Wow- I didn’t know Jarry was an obnoxious ass capable only of producing crap! I thought he was supposed to be a genius!”)

Let me say that my own experience with Tom Green is extremely limited- basically to seeing a few bits of him here and there, and the SNL episode he hosted (which was an excruciating endurance contest, which I endured in much the same anthropological spirit in which Chagnon endured being buried in an anthill.) My problem with him, based on the SNL episode, is that I knew people like him in high school and college, and it’s a little unclear to me why he got famous and they didn’t, except, perhaps, because of the relentless reductio ad nausea to which he takes, well, everything. I mean, I don’t see why someone gets paid a lot to say “duckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckgaaaaasssssspppppduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduckduck.” Why aren’t the Shower Rangers more famous than Tom Green? Aren’t they more obnoxious? Is Green at some Golden Mean of cultural excreta, obnoxious enough to get our attention, but not enough to offend his target audience? Why don’t the Tokyo Shock Boys host SNL? Unlike Tom Green, they work hard for the money. Does Tom Green crush cacti between his buttocks? No! Only the TSB do that!

In short, why did Tom Green get famous, while Joel from college didn’t? You see, Joel once got an umbrella handle minus the cloth bits that keep rain off you. It had a spring on it, and he would jounce the spring up and down, at all times. Joinkajoinkajoinka, on and on, without cease. A friend of mine once asked to see it, and immediately broke the damn thing over his knee. We rejoiced mightily, until Joel replaced the umbrella handle with numchucks. He would do clumsy kung-fu moves with real numchuks as he read sci-fi novels, every ten seconds crying “ooops!” as he let them slip so that they would fly across the room in random directions. Plus, if you asked him a question he would squinch up his face, bat his eyes spastically, and stutter the answer out over two or three full minutes, as this was his idea of how people might act during heroin withdrawal.

And while we’re on the subject, my wife and I were discussing Quentin Tarantino this morning. My position on Tarantino? Let’s look at why he’s famous:

“You know what ‘Like a Virgin’ is about? There’s this slut, see, and all day it’s dickdickdickdickDICKdickdickdickdick, dick in the morning, dick at night, all kinds of dick shoved into her pussy at all times, dickdickdickdickdickdick DICK dick DICK dick etc. etc.” (You may notice that there is a superficial resemblence between the elocutionary styles of Tarantino and Green at this point…) Let’s face it- Tarantino got paid an obscene sum to write five minutes of dialogue about comic books which was inserted at random into “Crimson Tide.” It had nothing to do with the movie, its tone was radically different from the rest of the movie, and it even seemed somewhat out of character for Denzel Washington’s character. One has visions of Jack Torrance, in the middle of Kubrick’s “The Shining,” suddenly asking Wendy if she knows what they call Dave’s Spicy Chicken Sandwich in France. It was a literary transposon, for the genetically inclined among you, sowing destruction as it carelessly spliced itself into cinematic genomes. And why do we have to pay Tarantino for this? Because it’s about the Silver Surfer! The Silver Surfer is in a literary time-vault that only Tarantino has access to, so only he can write about it! And he’s so cool for being able to do it!

What about Jerry, from high school? He talked about sex incessantly. He was into Prince, Madonna, and he memorized every line “Sixteen Candles,” “The Breakfast Club,” and all those other movies with up-and-coming brat pack Stars of Tomorrow like Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson. I’m sure he could write a few minutes of dialogue which could be inserted into movies at random, and he could probably use words like “dick” and “pussy” more frequently than Tarantino does. So why is Tarantino famous? Sure, he did clever things with time in his first two movies, but that’s not what he’s getting paid for these days! For all the talk of how young Tarantino sat in his video store dreaming of making movies, he’s not making them anymore. Why? Maybe it’s because he gets paid more to talk about the Silver Surfer’s dick?
-Ben

19

Yes, and that “alternate hypothesis” is nothing but a self-serving, “I’m better than all the other movie critics” piece of tripe on the part of the viewer. If you don’t have the balls to actually provide critique for a fucking movie, why the hell are you a critic?!?

20

For that matter, why is offending people considered to be highbrow art? Let’s put it like this:

Last Temptation of Christ: offends people by challenging their assumptions. Art.

Crowley, pooping on a platter and offering it to his dinner guests as souveniers: offends people by acting asinine. Not art. But memorable, and admittedly semi-clever, in its context.

Duckducketc.: asinine. Not memorable. Not clever. Not art.

I mean, is Green challenging the audience’s assumptions, or is he just full of himself, a two-bit Crowley? For that matter, think of Mein Kampf. It was even more offensive and egotistical than Green’s opus. Why isn’t it considered highbrow art? Why don’t literature students study it alongside Jarry as a lesson in how to extract maximum offense from the audience? “The brilliance in Hitler’s literary technique lay in the fact that Germany at the time was the least anti-Semitic state in Europe. Thus Hitler could on the one hand shock the complacent middle-class out of their comfortable assumptions about Jews and their place in society, and at the same time draw them in to his dialectic, much as Burroughs did through his portrayals of deviant sex acts.”

-Ben