Free My Year of Flops by Nathan Rabin

it’s neither hilarious nor particularly suspenseful. Someone has to kill the cathode-ray babysitter, after all, and as a literal child of the industry (his parents are the comedy duo of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara), Stiller was uniquely qualified for the job.
    Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Secret Success
    Fun With Animals Case File #61: Freddy Got Fingered
    Originally Posted August 23, 2007
    The notorious 2001 comedy
Freddy Got Fingered
has a reputation as both one of the worst films ever made and a movie so singularly bizarre that it’s hard to believe it actually
got
made. Studios exist precisely to keep films this audacious from hitting theaters. I’ve never seen any of Tom Green’s various shows, but I watched
Fingered
with open-mouthed admiration. It’s the kind of movie you feel the need to watch again immediately just to make sure you didn’t hallucinate it the first time around.
    Fingered
casts director and cowriter Green as Gord Brody, a 28-year-old aspiring animator who heads to Hollywood armed with little but a dream, a drawing of a bag of dripping baboon eyeballs attached to a balloon, and a complete lack of social skills. Gord bullies his way into the office of animation executive Mr. Davidson (Anthony Michael Hall) by pretending that the man’s wife has died a hideous death, then dresses up as an English bobby and harangues him in a restaurant. Davidson looks at Gord’s drawing and issues a stern judgment: “It doesn’t make any sense. It’s fucking stupid. What you need here is elevation. There has to be something happening here that’s actually funny.” It isn’t hard to imagine studio executives saying the exact same thing to Green upon receiving the
Fingered
script. Thank God he didn’t listen to reason. Or common sense. Or decency.
    Did I mention the part where Gord pulls over to the side of the road, sees a giant horse cock, and grasps it lustily? It didn’t really have anything to do with anything, but then neither does most of
Freddy Got Fingered
. It’s a movie for the YouTube era; just about any 10-minute block functions as a perversely fascinating, surreal mini-movie with an anti-logic all its own.
Fingered
introduces a straightforward plot (dreamer moves to Hollywood to make it as an animator and toils at a cheese-sandwich factory until he gets his chance) solely so it can casually discard it. Gord’s Hollywood adventures are largely over in about 15 minutes, at which point the film turns into a black-comicpsychodrama about Gord’s hate-hate relationship with his father, Jim (Rip Torn).
    Nobody plays drunken, profane, rage-choked authority figures quite like Rip Torn. Torn attacks his role here like he’s performing in an avant-garde art movie rather than a gross-out vehicle for a wacky MTV personality. And he’s right to do so: Any resemblance between
Freddy Got Fingered
and a conventional studio comedy is purely coincidental.
    Gord’s rampaging id recalls such beloved man-children as Pee-wee Herman and
Wayne’s World
’s Wayne Campbell. But where Pee-wee and Wayne represent guileless childhood innocence, Green represents childhood’s dark side. To get back at his dad, Gord convinces a psychiatrist that Jim habitually molests Gord’s straight-arrow younger brother (Eddie Kaye Thomas), who is subsequently placed in the Institute for Sexually Molested Children, even though he’s clearly in his mid-20s.
    Sprinkled throughout
Fingered
are gross-out setpieces executed with brazen fearlessness: Gord delivers a baby, then chews through the umbilical cord and swings the newborn around like a lasso. Gord takes Davidson’s advice that he needs to “get inside” his animal characters by slicing open a dead moose and running around with it on top of him. In an especially queasy sequence, Gord’s father drunkenly pulls down his pants and tauntingly dares his son to sodomize him. In