Freddy Got Fingered (2001)

March 24, 2016 9:18 PM

An unemployed cartoonist moves back in with his parents and younger brother Freddy. When his parents demand he leave, he begins to spread rumors that his father is sexually abusing Freddy.

Apparently one of the worst movies ever. Came up in a recent post to the Blue. Why not?

posted by Hoopo (20 comments total)

You posted this because of this, right?

I've never seen it before, but everyone I know who did hated it.
Even stoners.
posted by Mezentian at 10:52 PM on March 24, 2016 [8 favorites]

Oh no you didn't. Tom Green is (was?) like a third rate Pauly Shore, and this movie is like a third rate Son in Law. I feel sad just thinking about how bad that is.
posted by Literaryhero at 1:46 AM on March 25, 2016

Green's MTV show was funny, fascinating stuff, a lot more edgy and transgressive than it gets credit for. Some of those bits were like really good performance art.

But this movie, oy.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 4:51 AM on March 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

I think is one of those cultural artifacts like Moby Dick, where people don't start accepting it's greatness until a couple generations have passed.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 5:53 AM on March 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

An unemployed cartoonist moves back in with his parents and younger brother Freddy. When his parents demand he leave, he begins to spread rumors that his father is sexually abusing Freddy.

I . . . holy shit. I've never seen this movie. That's legit the meaning of the title????? I kinda assumed he was the fall guy in a Mafia deal gone wrong or something ludicrous.


Holy shit.
posted by chainsofreedom at 7:14 AM on March 25, 2016 [13 favorites]

The thread on the Blue in question.

As pointed out by some people there, FGF was probably not supposed to be a good movie. Tom Green is a lifelong, dedicated anticomedian, in the vein of Andy Kaufman (though not as good, and more focused on one particular aspect). His shtick is seeing how weird and uncomfortable he can make his audience and how they respond to it.

So if you go into this movie with that in mind, it works. If you think of it as Green not only trolling his audience, but the studio that paid him (and a lot of other people) to make it, then it is a fucking masterpiece.
posted by Etrigan at 7:21 AM on March 25, 2016 [10 favorites]

That's legit the meaning of the title?????

20 years has changed a lot.

then it is a fucking masterpiece.

Well, Drew married him for some reason, so: maybe?
Is there a rifftrax?
posted by Mezentian at 8:18 AM on March 25, 2016

The movie is its own rifftrax.
posted by Etrigan at 8:31 AM on March 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

I seem to remember sausages and a keyboard and Rip Torn being crabby
posted by ian1977 at 9:11 AM on March 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've never seen it before, but everyone I know who did hated it.

A friend of mine and his brother have an annual tradition of getting together and watching it with the director's commentary on, which is apparently pure Dada genius.
posted by Itaxpica at 11:01 AM on March 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

Roger Ebert: 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.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:05 PM on March 25, 2016 [6 favorites]

like a third rate Pauly Shore,

Now, now. We're not monsters here, are we?
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:27 PM on March 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

A friend of mine was a Tom Green fan at the time, and he invited me to go see this movie along with two girls. I think he had even intended it as some kind of date?

Anyway, holy shit. Still the only time I've walked out of a movie in the theater.
posted by davejh at 1:11 PM on March 27, 2016

Anyway, holy shit. Still the only time I've walked out of a movie in the theater.

Can you clarify? I am kind of horiffydly amazed by this movie now.
posted by chainsofreedom at 3:00 PM on March 27, 2016

I was a college sophomore when this came out, so basically the peak FGF target audience. The movie is so terrible and unfunny that it breaks the funny barrier and becomes funny. Not hilarious, but funny. I remember "getting" it at the time, but that most of my friends just hated it because they couldn't see the antihumor and just saw the idiocy. I almost want to watch it again to see if I still have the same reaction. Almost, but not quite.
posted by gatorae at 8:17 PM on March 27, 2016

"Hear me out, though, because I come not to bury Mr. Green but — guardedly and with a slightly guilty conscience — to praise him. " - NYTimes Review.

4 stars on Amazon.
posted by el io at 1:11 AM on March 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Roger Ebert: 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.

It is unfair to reference the original review without Ebert's later comments (particularly given the awful/deliberate controversy)

Seeing Tom Green reminded me, as how could it not, of his movie "Freddy Got Fingered" (2001), which was so poorly received by the film critics that it received only one lonely, apologetic positive review on the Tomatometer. I gave it--let's see--zero stars. Bad movie, especially the scene where Green was whirling the newborn infant around his head by its umbilical cord.

But the thing is, I remember "Freddy Got Fingered" more than a year later. I refer to it sometimes. It is a milestone. And for all its sins, it was at least an ambitious movie, a go-for-broke attempt to accomplish something. It failed, but it has not left me convinced that Tom Green doesn't have good work in him. Anyone with his nerve and total lack of taste is sooner or later going to make a movie worth seeing.

posted by phearlez at 8:41 AM on March 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

Can you clarify? I am kind of horiffydly amazed by this movie now.

I felt I had to leave to protect myself from this movie. I didn't want the things on the screen going into my brain anymore. I didn't even want to stay to get my money's worth, because it was worth more to me to stop watching.
posted by davejh at 8:15 AM on April 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Mike and Jay discuss the much-hated Tom Green vehicle Freddy Got Fingered.
posted by Pendragon at 9:44 AM on April 22, 2018

DADDY WOULD YOU LIKE SOME SAUSAGE

I never saw this movie but I did see that scene from the trailer and it will haunt/delight me forever in its utter insanity
posted by knownassociate at 12:31 PM on November 8, 2018