Freddy Got Fingered is on The Criterion Channel. Holy crap!
If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll probably have one of three reactions:
- That’s weird. I wonder if it’s as bad as I remember it.
- Cancel my subscription immediately!
- “Daddy, would you like some sausage?”
If you haven’t seen it, get ready for a once-in-a-lifetime cinematic experience. Whether it’s good or bad will be a matter of taste. Or lack of it.
Here’s how The Criterion Channel is pitching it:
“Irredeemable affront to good taste? Or subversive Dada masterpiece? Critically reviled upon its release but increasingly recognized for its undeniable, go-for-broke audacity, Tom Green’s infamous gross-out comedy is a true cinematic Rorschach test. Described by Green himself as the “touching story of a young man who desperately wants to make his daddy proud,” FREDDY GOT FINGERED casts the writer-director-star as Gord, an unemployed wannabe cartoonist whose desperate attempts to please his father (Rip Torn) lead him into all sorts of misadventures—whether it’s getting way too friendly with a horse on a stud farm, creating his own form of sausage-based performance art, or wreaking havoc inside a hospital delivery room.”
Click here to watch the trailer.
The film, released in 2001, is part of a new collection on The Criterion Channel called And the Razzie Goes to … that celebrates the long-running award show parody known as the Razzie Awards. While the rest of Hollywood falls over itself, crowning the Best Actors, Actresses, Movies, etc of the year, the Razzie Awards are given out for the Worst in the same categories. Freddy Got Fingered received 8 nominations in 2002, winning Worst Picture, Worst Actor (Green), Worst Director (Green), and Worst Screenplay (Green and Derek Harvie). In 2010, Freddy Got Fingered was nominated for Worst Picture of the Decade but lost to the John Travolta sci-fi/Scientology fiasco, Battlefield Earth, a movie so bad The Criterion Channel didn’t even add it to its Razzie collection.
(Note: in 2002, Tom Green became the first winner of a Razzie for the worst picture of the year to show up to receive it.)
With all this evidence stacking up to prove how bad it is, why is Freddy Got Fingered on a prestige platform like The Criterion Channel?
First of all, lighten up. One of the problems (if that’s the right word) with The Criterion Channel is the misconception that it’s just a pretentious collection of foreign films and obscure indies that never even played in an actual theater. While you can find plenty of both those genres on the channel, you can find just about everything else, from Hollywood Hits to International Classics to Exclusive Premiers. And every month, the channel’s programmers develop a new set of curated Collections for you to dive into. Plenty of intelligent and insightful interviews with filmmakers on the site also go far beyond the inane ramblings you usually get with a mainstream commentary or featured extra. You can use your Instagram to watch a few seconds of Greta Gerwig on a red carpet talking about Barbie, or you can go to the Adventures in Movie Making section of The Criterion Channel and have her introduce some of the movies that influenced her as a filmmaker. So you can listen to Geriwg talk about The Red Shoes and then watch The Red Shoes. How cool is that? You can also explore The Criterion Collection and watch some of the movies that Gerwig acted in, like the fabulous Frances Ha.
Think of The Criterion Channel as an affordable online film school that doesn’t limit itself to what film scholars or the more pompous reviewers call “important” films. The programmers cast a much wider net, so you could sign on at Halloween, click on the Art House Horror channel, and watch the insane House, directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, or the haunting Eyes Without a Face, directed by Georges Franju. And when mainstream moviegoers suddenly discovered Michelle Yeoh as a result of her excellent performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once, The Criterion Channel was there with Michelle Yeoh Kicks Ass, a collection of her martial arts movies.
And the Razzie Goes to … may be the best channel The Criterion Channel has developed yet, a channel that “pays tribute to those divisive films that continue to fascinate and provoke debate while calling into question the very line that separates high and low culture.” Some of the films included on the channel are legendary for their awfulness: Ishtar with Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty, Swept Away with Madonna, and the jaw-dropping Gigli starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, and Al Pacino.
- Larry Gigli (Affleck): That’s why these lesbians are always going out and buyin’… spendin’ all their dough on like, ya know, sexual appliances and erotic monkey wrenches and shit, tryin’ to compensate for what they don’t have… The penis.
Some movies on the Razzie channel may be equally offensive to some viewers, while others (like this author) like them a lot: Nicolas Cage in The Wicker Man, Pamela Anderson in Barb Wire, and Al Pacino in Cruising. And if I had a dollar for every time I watched Elizabeth Berkley and Gina Gershon in Showgirls, I could pay for my subscription to The Criterion Channel for a year.
- Cristal Connors (Gershon): Where do you dance at, darlin’?
- Nomi Malone (Berkley): Um… at the Cheetah.
- Cristal Connors: I don’t know how good you are, darlin’, and I don’t know what it is you’re good at, but if it’s at the Cheetah, it’s not dancing, I know that much.
- Nomi Malone: You don’t know shit!
Now that’s entertainment. Or at least it is to anyone with a sense of cinematic humor. Every one of the movies in And the Razzie Goes To… is guaranteed to divide its audience between those who love them and those who do not. It’s hard to be neutral when you watch Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly in Xanadu, a film that famously received the one-sentence review: “In a word, Xana-don’t.”
So explore, enjoy, and let the debates begin. Start with something other than Freddy Gor Fingered. because you may not go back for more.
And as a final note, the films in And the Razzie Goes to … aren’t even the strangest offerings from The Criterion Channel this month. Isabella Rossellini’s series of short films, Green Porno+, is a combination of “science, performance art, and DIY puppetry to illuminate the intimate, unexpected oddities of the natural world.” Those just have to be seen to be believed.
