Gord Brody (Tom Green) is a 28 year old slacker who finally leaves home to go to Hollywood and pursue is dream of working as a cartoon animator. Of course, making it as an artist is not that easy, and Gord finds himself rejected by a studio executive (Anthony Michael Hall) and stuck in a cheese sandwich factory, a dead-end job if there ever was one. So he returns to Portland and moves back in his parents’ basement, much to the disenchantment of his father (Rip Torn). Dad wants him to get a job, but Brody prefers to take it easy drawing his “doodles”, skateboarding with his best buddy (Harland Williams) and hanging with his wheelchair-bound rocket scientist girlfriend (Marisa Coughland). Henceforth begins a war between father and son where no blow is too low, be it destroying Gord’s skateboard ramp or denouncing Daddy as a child molester who’d fingered younger brother Freddy (Eddie Kaye Thomas).

It’s been advanced that insanity and genius are two sides of a same reality, two somehow intertwined extremes. Tom Green’s oeuvre is a good example of that. From his original Canadian show to its reinvented MTV version, Green has made a name for himself by pulling the most demented stunts, be it humping a dead moose, putting a horse’s head in his parents’ bed à la Godfather or make a whole show of his real-life removal of a cancer-ridden testicle. Some will dismiss it all as the work of a wacko, but others find it kind of brilliant in an admittedly very quirky way. I fall in the latter category, finding Green to be a fearless performer with an intriguing vision. He stole and ran away with “Road Trip” last year, and now with “Freddy Got Fingered” (which he co-wrote and directed), he’s come up with, in his own words, “the stupidest, most disgusting movie you’ve ever seen”.

He starts off with a familiar tone, that of many an 80s teen comedy, with an early scene showing him skateboarding through a shopping mall while a security guard chases him. Then his parents wave him goodbye as he leaves home, and then… He stops his car by a farm, runs up to a horse, grabs its erecting penis and starts jerking it vigorously! How many 80s comedies provided such a sight? Right there, you know if this movie is for you. Unsurprisingly, many people aren’t interested in a picture featuring inter-species hand-jobs. For instance, if you look at sites like Rotten Tomatoes, you’ll see that “Freddy Got Fingered” has received nearly nothing but brutally negative reviews. To many a film reviewer, it seems this is the bottom of the barrel and then some.

Well, once again, I beg to differ. Yes, Tom Green’s directorial debut is juvenile, vulgar, generally sloppily crafted, offensive and thoroughly retarded. Then again, it’s the most hilarious movie I’ve seen so far this year, and Green is rivetingly grotesque. Syndicated critic Roger Ebert loathed the film but accurately described the film as a “milestone of neo-surrealism”. Indeed, for every gross-out scene involving a bloody deer carcass or whatnot, we get delightfully absurd moments like Green playing keyboards with attached sausages or the “backwards man”. In any case, I’ll take wretched fun like “Freddy Got Fingered” over a (supposedly) sophisticated bore like last week’s Bridget Jones’ Diary any day.

UPDATED : DVD Review

Ohmigod. This movie just gets better! Yes, I know, the vast majority of critics hated it; James Berardinelli even wrote he has “gotten better entertainment value from a colonoscopy” (whatever gets you off, dude!). I don’t get it. Or maybe it’s “they” who don’t get it. I truly believe writer-director-star Tom Green has done something special here. Even if you don’t find his humor funny (I personally think it’s hilarious), his film is still rivetingly offbeat. There’s all this weird and weirder stuff that keeps happening. But then again, it actually holds itself, there IS a story. A nice story, about man-child who wants to be an artist but whose ambitions are squashed by his father who wants him to quit dreaming and get a stupid day job. There’s even a love story worked in, and it’s actually sweet how Betty inspires Gordy to not give up. Of course, all this generally degenerates into insanity, but this is a Tom Green movie after all!

I find Gordy to be an endearing character, I like the scenes with his crippled girlfriend, the dynamic between him and his dad is fun. The cast is good, from an unrecognizable Anthony Michael Hall to the shameless Rip Torn, the charming and funny Marisa Coughland and deadpan performances from Eddie Kaye Thomas and Harland Williams. Green himself is just, whoa. To me, he’s an artist. You can’t deny he has a wild imagination. The things he does with his voice, his body, his face. He also turns out to be a surprisingly good director; very few comedies are this visually inventive, and the punk soundtrack is awesome. Or, going back to his screenplay, it’s hard to fathom how he can come up with bits of dialogue like this particularly zesty one, from a scene where Gordy tells his mom she deserves better than his dad : “If I were you, I would show him that I deserve respect. If I were you I would go out, I’d have sex with strange men, I’d have sex with basketball players. I’d have sex with Greeks, men from Greece.” Here’s a rather classic scene, the son telling his mother she doesn’t have to put up with her abusive husband, yet look how Green goes out on a tangent way into too-much-information territory!

But here I am reviewing the movie again when I should really be telling you about the DVD extras, which are really enjoyable. Well, if you loathe the movie, I doubt they will change your mind, but if you like Green, you’ll love this disc. Extra features include trailers, TV spots, a featurette, a half hour behind-the-scenes MTV special, as well as an audience participation track from the premiere of the movie. I only listened to a bit of that, since I couldn’t see the point; there’s also a track like that on the “Rocky Horror” DVD, but that’s a movie where background noise is expected. More interesting are the deleted scenes, which include a cameo by Canadian unfunny late night host Mike Bullard, scenes with Gord’s Uncle Neal and his Native American gay lover and a rather nifty spoof of the opening of “Apocalypse Now” which had to be axed because The Doors were asking 400 grands for the rights to “The End”.

And then there’s the commentaries. There are a few scene-specific ones by the actors which are pretty straight-forward (though Harland Williams sounds stoned on his), but it’s the one by Green that you really need to hear. It’s a demented, silly track which is almost as funny as the movie itself. Hear about the slickness of horse penises, about how the movie is similar to a Three’s Company episode, hear Green choke on a coffee stirring stick and do a lot of inane play-by-play (“here I am. oh I’m acting.. music, music.”). And when he runs out of things to say, Green actually makes a bunch of “irrelevant sounds” or sings ! Actually, we do learn a little about the making of the movie, like how autobiographical it can be, since real-life Green used to love skateboarding and flipping creamers (!) and he had to move back into his parents’ basement when he was struggling to find a way to get paid to be stupid.

Green also gets back at the critics, namely EW’s Owen Gleiberman who not only panned the movie but went on to write that Green had “a hyperactive computer addict’s stringbean body, a wimp’s receding profile (his goatee seems to be shouting, “I know I’m here to fill out this guy’s loser face!”), and the rabid, staring eyes of a deranged lizard.” Talk about a personnal attack! I don’t blame Green for raging on in his commentary about how critics “are old. and bored, and cynical. I hate them all!” Sour grapes aside, Green does make some good points about how he was really trying to “send up the formula of mainstream movies”, or how they relatively “took the high road. No poo poo or pee pee. Like Annie Hall.” Not quite, but I stand by my belief that “Freddy Got Fingered” is by far the most underrated film of the year, when it’s actually been one of the most entertaining. See, Tom, some people *did* get it.