Be warned

This review comes with multiple severe warnings. I have pledged to be honest with the fine readership of this publication, so I will admit a pensive admiration for Freddy Got Fingered.

Warning No. 1: If you do not love Tom Green, do not see this film. By love, I mean laugh hysterically simply at the sight of the guy. If you chortle just a bit at the sight of Tom Green, or perhaps giggle a little when he’s licking a mouse, you are disqualified. You cannot see this movie. You must LOVE Tom Green to see this film.

Warning No. 2: If you read this column and take it in good faith when I recommend something, please pay heed to Warning No. 1. Don’t go because the popcorn box is smiling a little. You could find yourself in severe pain.

Freddy Got Fingered marks Green’s directing debut and it is, simply put, one of the sickest films to ever receive an R rating (it deserves to be NC-17). Green has set out to be as outrageous as the celluloid forum will allow him to be, and he succeeds on this level. He is one bizarre bastard.

Green plays a skateboarding slacker who leaves the confines of his father’s basement for a big-time job at a cheese sandwich factory. He takes the job in Hollywood, where he plans to push his drawings of beavers and X-ray cats at an animation studio. When a producer at the studio (a funny Anthony Michael Hall) advises Green to quit his cheese sandwich job and improve his silly drawings, he returns to his father’s basement and all hell breaks loose.

I am perhaps one of very few people on the planet who laughs at the sight of Green jerking off a horse. This particular scene in Fingered doesn’t feature special effects or prosthetics. He’s really messing with a horse, and I, for one, can’t believe it made it past the MPAA. I laughed, but I feel a bit guilty about it.

Green brings to the big screen the same manic, absolutely insane brand of humor that made his TV show so funny, and the transition is a little bumpy. It’s also filled with elephant semen, the remarkable sight of Green swinging a newborn baby around by its umbilical cord and Green often screaming at the top of his lungs. Throw into the mix Green licking his friend’s compound fracture wound, and you get the picture.

Rip Torn is OK as Green’s beleaguered father—perhaps overacting just a tad. Still, Torn going over-the-top is often a good companion piece to Green’s bouncing off the walls. My favorite moment featuring the two would be the meat organ, a keyboard linked by ropes to various sausages and steaks. There’s no use explaining its existence, but it does provide a nice excuse for the “Daddy Would You Like Some Sausage?” song.

People can scream all they want about the frightening imagery Green conjures up. There are far more grotesque and disgusting films out there that have achieved a critical and cult status. I liken this film to pictures like Evil Dead 2 or Dawn of the Dead—horror shows with laughs. Freddy Got Fingered is prime midnight movie material, in the spirit of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, excepting for the fact that it will probably induce more vomiting.

So if you are looking for a good freak-out with laughs, Freddy Got Fingered might be up your alley. And don’t yell at me if you should hate it and demand your money back. I gave you plenty of warnings. I don’t care what anybody says, it’s 10 times funnier than Joe Dirt.