Sad Hill Media

Film & Lesser Arts with Will Ross, Devan Scott, & Daniel Jeffery.

Apr 21, 2010

Freddy Got Fingered (2001)

by Devan Scott and Will Ross.
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Freddy Got Fingered is a film in which a strange, demented man named Gord struggles to achieve his dream of creating an animated series. He lives with his parents, and his father constantly insults him as a lazy failure. While striving for his dream, Gord has a number of shocking and graphic misadventures and exacts brutal revenge on his father.

On April 20th, 2010, Devan Scott and Will Ross sat down to watch Freddy Got Fingered. Will for the second time, Devan for the first. These are their thoughts.

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Will

There is little original thought I can present on Freddy Got Fingered. Those who know anything about it know of its reputation as an unfunny, offensive film, but it’s more excruciating than its reputation. It’s a madhouse. A parade of miseries and surreal horrors. It could only make its subject matter sadder and more revolting by being presented as a comedy, which it is.

Unwitting though it may be, the film’s attempts at absurd, crude, and shock humour combine into a beastly depiction of indifference to human anguish. A child’s mouth is smashed by a baseball. We see a close up of his father caring for him as he weeps and bleeds, and we are expected to laugh. The image alone is unsettling and depressing enough, but all the more disturbing because we know that we are expected to laugh, and that the force behind the suffering finds it funny. It molests our concepts of sympathy and pain.

Tom Green’s character does many extraordinarily horrible things in this film, all to people who are shocked and often terrified of him. Green does not direct his actors poorly: Their fear and disgust are palpable. That he licks the bone jutting from the leg of his screaming friend is a crude and unfunny concept as it stands, but the injury is not comically depicted or warranted. What results is a film that stands for the purpose of mocking human torment and decency.

For most comedies, being unfunny is the biggest possible flaw. In the case of Freddy Got Fingered, being unfunny, poorly crafted, wrong-headed or mean-spirited are the minor issues, for they pale in comparison to its only lasting effect on us: The uncomfortable incredulity that such a perception of humanity exists.

-Will Ross

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Devan

I have seen many awful movies. Too many, really. All About Steve. Battlefield Earth. Pearl Harbor. From Justin to Kelly. Confessions of a Shopaholic. Manos: The Hands of Fate. And, yes, the entire Epic/Date/Disaster Movie series. So know that when I say not one of those films could have prepared me for the sheer excruciation and horror that engulfed me while watching Freddy Got Fingered, I mean it. Boy, do I ever mean it.

This is a film that purports to be a comedy. It’s about people, I think. One can never be sure. Most films are about people. I hesitate to call the beings that populate this film “people”, though. They walk, sure. They talk, sure. But to call them “people” would be to imply the human race consists entirely of retarded, soulless, barely cognizant man-children. Maybe in this way Freddy Got Fingered is some sort of grand commentary on the state of the human race. I doubt it. That would be giving the abomination too much credit.

A few minutes into this ‘comedy’ (even with scare quotes, I should state that this label means nothing in this context), Tom Green sees a horse. For no reason, he runs to it, yelling “I WANT TO TRY THE HORSEY”, and proceeds to stroke its penis. This is later repeated with an elephant. Afterwards, he comes across a dead caribou lying on the road, eviscerates it, and clothes himself in its bloody carcass. Later on, he forcibly delivers a baby against the mother’s will; when it appears to be stillborn, he bites off the umbilical cord and swings the blood-soaked baby around his head. Later still, a young boy runs into a plane’s propeller and dies; blood sprays everywhere.

Freddy Got Fingered expects you to laugh at these horrific events. Why? Simply because they’re shown. No further reason is given. My theory about Freddy being a commentary about the human condition aside, there is no message or greater purpose for any of what is exhibited here. It just is. This, I think, is the most unsettling thing about Freddy. It asks us to laugh at naked human misery and cruelty. That isn’t in itself special. There are many films, good and bad, that do ask us to that. But Tom Green’s opus is unique not only in the appalling degree to which it takes the misery and cruelty, but in being completely devoid of any point or rationale. Why is someone swinging a bloody fetus around his head? Because it’s funny. That is the logic behind Freddy Got Fingered.

Please, from the bottom of my heart, do not watch this movie. You will lead a richer life having not seen Freddy Got Fingered.

-Devan Scott.

(P.S. I still begrudge Will for telling me beforehand "You don't know what you're getting into" instead of "THIS FILM IS LITERALLY THE SPAWN OF SATAN PLEASE DON'T WATCH IT")

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