Freddy Got Fingered is a 2001 comedy film directed, co-written by and starring Tom Green. Some of the scenes feature similar antics to those seen in his own The Tom Green Show and scenes in Road Trip. It is largely built around gross-out and shock humor. Much of the movie was filmed in Southern California.

Freddy Got Fingered has been called one of the worst films of all time by many organizations and film critics.

Shocking? Sure, if You Keep Your Eyes Open

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: April 20, 2001, Friday - New York Times

The final credits of ''Freddy Got Fingered,'' and its redundant but obligatory outtakes, roll to the sound of Eminem's white-boy hip-hop anthem ''The Real Slim Shady,'' which includes a reference to this movie's director, star and co-writer. Why, the rapper asks (and here I must paraphrase), do people take offense at his lyrics when Tom Green can, with apparent impunity, violate a dead moose on MTV?

It's a fair enough question, if somewhat disingenuous. Eminem and Mr. Green, who rose to fame as the creator and host of a prank-driven show on that cable channel, share a taste (if that's the right word) for confrontational shock tactics. And they have become, not entirely against their will, fodder for the latest round of pious hand wringing about the state of youth-oriented pop culture for their brazen affronts to decency and propriety.

But forget about all that for a moment. For the record, no dead moose appears in ''Freddy Got Fingered,'' though Mr. Green does stimulate a live elephant and a lusty stallion, decks himself out shaman style in the bloody hide of a road-killed buck and wears a human umbilical cord duct-taped to his navel. Still, just as Eminem disarms anyone who bothers to listen to his songs (rather than quoting them secondhand for the purposes of punditry) with his verbal wit and rhythmic dexterity, so does Mr. Green stage his gross-outs with a demented but unmistakable integrity. Like it or not, he's an artist.

At the screening of ''Freddy Got Fingered'' I attended, a number of viewers clearly chose not, sweeping down the aisles with their coats flapping behind them like agitated bats. The scene that provoked the largest exodus was one in which Mr. Green's character, Gord Brody, a 28-year-old aspiring cartoonist living in his parents' basement, delivers a child, severs the umbilicus with his teeth and then swings the baby over his head before tenderly handing it to the stunned, blood-spattered mother. (''I saved the day,'' he declares as he is escorted from the hospital.)

This was, I have to say, a bit much, as were the several gruesome injuries visited on a perky young boy with the misfortune to be Gord's neighbor and the subplot in which Gord falsely accuses his father (Rip Torn) of molesting Gord's younger brother Freddy (who is 25). If you were wondering about the meaning of the film's title, now you know.

So consider yourself sufficiently warned. Hear me out, though, because I come not to bury Mr. Green but -- guardedly and with a slightly guilty conscience -- to praise him. Like the unjustly maligned and neglected ''Monkeybone,'' this much-hyped picture is in danger of being dismissed as yet another exercise in dumbed-down toilet humor. But to throw it into the refuse pile along with ''Saving Silverman,'' ''Say It Isn't So'' and ''Tomcats'' would be to underestimate Mr. Green's originality and to misconstrue his intentions.

In a recent article in Entertainment Weekly, Mr. Green boasted (and again I must paraphrase) about the absence of excremental and flatulent humor in his movie. The standard gross-out comedy relies on these elements and combines them with adolescent male sexual panic, as if toilet training and puberty were simultaneous developmental occurrences.

Mr. Green's humor is certainly regressive, as film comedy has been at least since Fatty Arbuckle appeared in diapers. But ''Freddy Got Fingered'' forsakes the muddy field of infantile narcissism for the fertile, frightening ground of middle childhood. It's less about the dangers and pleasures of the unchained id than the giddy anarchy of the unbound imagination. It's scarier than ''Scary Movie'' and funnier, too.

Though Gord dreams of being an animator (and travels from his Oregon home to Los Angeles in the hope of breaking into television), his true mtier, like that of his creator, is a kind of pure and audacious conceptual performance art. The movie's comic heart consists of a series of indescribably loopy, elaborately conceived happenings that are at once rigorous and chaotic, idiotic and brilliant. Some of these -- the ''backwards man'' bit, the sausage-piano concert and the fake cell phone in the restaurant scene -- might have qualified for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts if MTV and studio money hadn't been forthcoming and may show up some day at the Museum of Modern Art.

Like any mature artist, Mr. Green bows to the traditions that fed him while refusing mere imitation. His love interest, Betty, is a paraplegic (and an amateur rocket scientist) whose sexual interests include being whacked on the shins with a bamboo cane. Their romance owes something to the kinky humanism of John Waters and the Farrelly brothers, and Gord himself could be the younger brother of the overgrown paper boy from ''Get a Life,'' Chris Elliott's sitcom from the cheesy golden age of Fox television.

Mr. Green's style, toggling between antic and deadpan, is like a less hostile version of the work Michael O'Donoghue and Andy Kaufman did in the early days of ''Saturday Night Live.'' Mr. Green is less an actor than a persona, and he resolutely refuses to mark the boundaries of his imposture or to resort to the winking, supercilious pseudo-irony that remains the default setting for so much second-rate pop culture.

His assaultive forays into public space pay homage (perhaps inadvertently) to 70's conceptualist pioneers like Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci, mixing in some of the sweet absurdism of William Wegman before he was captured by ''Sesame Street'' (and with a preference for wild over domesticated animals).

This movie's set pieces, many of which seem to revel in the double meaning of the word gag, are draped over a rickety but serviceable narrative trellis. The core conflict, between Gord and his father, is like something Ingmar Bergman might have written for SCTV. The elder Brody is a ferocious avatar of the work ethic, a dervish of brutality, shame and thwarted tenderness.

The casting of Mr. Torn provides a fine piece of visual humor; with his lank hair and goatee he looks like a squashed, dried-out version of Mr. Green. As a director Mr. Green is competent, which is no small achievement, given the lurching sloppiness of so much movie comedy these days. His visual style is as relentless as his personality.

In the opening sequence Gord hurtles through a shopping mall on his skateboard as one of Eminem's progenitors, the Sex Pistols' Johnny Rotten, squalls and spits a song called ''Problems,'' a catalog of disaffection whose chorus declares, ''The problem is you.'' This is the gauntlet Mr. Green, genial and repellent, throws down before both his fans and his detractors. You can take it or leave it. (But if you take it, put on some latex gloves and wash up when you're finished. Who knows where it's been?)

No joke, the worst movie I have ever actually watched. Worse than Showgirls.

I felt like I needed to take several showers after watching this.

Z-

Are you guys serious?

Like, really?

B-

Toilet humour can be great sometimes.

In a recent article in Entertainment Weekly, Mr. Green boasted (and again I must paraphrase) about the absence of excremental and flatulent humor in his movie. The standard gross-out comedy relies on these elements and combines them with adolescent male sexual panic, as if toilet training and puberty were simultaneous developmental occurrences.

Mr. Green's humor is certainly regressive, as film comedy has been at least since Fatty Arbuckle appeared in diapers. But ''Freddy Got Fingered'' forsakes the muddy field of infantile narcissism for the fertile, frightening ground of middle childhood. It's less about the dangers and pleasures of the unchained id than the giddy anarchy of the unbound imagination. It's scarier than ''Scary Movie'' and funnier, too.

I think that is why this film was less popular - it hit too close to home for much of it's young adult male target audience, who are more comfortable laughing at "toilet humor", than at "adolescent male sexual panic" as A.O. Scott posits above...

Please. A movie in which a man masturbates an elephant for no apparent reason and decides to bite off an umbilical cord with his teeth is not deep.

Please. A movie in which a man masturbates an elephant for no apparent reason and decides to bite off an umbilical cord with his teeth is not deep.

Please. A movie in which a man masturbates an elephant for no apparent reason and decides to bite off an umbilical cord with his teeth is not deep.

Well that, and using bradley's reasoning, teenagers must HATE American Pie and the like