Gordon Brody (Tom Green) is an aspiring cartoonist living at home with father Jim (Rip Torn), mother Julie (Julie Hagerty) and younger brother Freddy (Eddy Kaye Thomas) in Portland, Orgegon. He leaves for Hollywood to find success as an animator. Along the way he passes a stud farm and stops to play with a horse's penis, and is quite excited to be a "farmer" for the first time.
In Hollywood, studio mogul Dave Davidson (Anothony Michael Hall) tells him his cartoons need more work and rethinking. Gord moves back home, where he is treated badly by his father. The family is interrogated by a psychiatrist (Lorena Gale) and Gord fabricates a story about his father sexually molesting his brother in the basement. This is the source of the film's title. Gord neglects to mention that Freddy is 25, so father is taken away and Gord now has the house to himself.
Gord falls in love with beautiful nymphomaniac Betty (Marisa Coughlan), who is a nurse and amateur rocket scientist confined to a wheelchair. She loves giving oral sex to Gord and having her paralyzed legs beaten with a cane. As for Gord, he goes scuba diving in a toilet, plays an organ with sausages, swings a newborn baby around by its umbilical cord, licks a wound with bone protruding through the skin, and wears the carcass of a dead deer.
Julie: "Gordie, sit down. We're having roast beef."
Gord: "Why do you guys always have roast beef?"
Jim: "Boo-hoo. Little Lord Fauntleroy's tummy hurts because there's too much roast beef in it."
Gord: "It's just boring. I'm eating a chicken sandwich."
Jim: "No, you're not!"
Gord: "This is crazy. I'm a 28-year-old man, I should be able to eat a chicken sandwich if I want."
Jim: "He's 28 years old and he can eat a chicken sandwich. Very Impressive. Mike Fitzgibbon's son is a nuclear physicist, and my son can eat a chicken."
(grabs chicken sandwich and throws it to the dogs)
Julie: "Jim, no!"
Jim: "You can either eat that goddamn roast beef, or you can go to bed."
When the film was released, there was a magazine headline "Has Tom Green Gone Too Far?" FREDDY GOT FINGERED was unanimously panned by all critics. Some even gave it an unprecedented "negative one star out of five stars". Here are typical comments: "The worst piece of cinematic crap I have experienced"; "doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel, doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels"; and "quite simply the worst movie ever released by a major studio in Hollywood history". However, A. O. Scott of the New York Times compared it to conceptual performance art.
This movie won the Worst Film award in five categories at the 2001 Golden Raspberry Awards. The film won (drum roll, please): Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay, Worst Actor, Worst Director, and Worst Couple. Tom Green showed up in a tux at the ceremony to accept the awards, the first winner to ever do so. He brought along his own red carpet.
Others in the cast include: Harland Williams (Darren), Jackson Davies (Mr. Malloy), Connor Widdows (Andy Malloy), R. Nelson Brown (Larry), Shaquille O'Neal (Shaquille), Charles Buettner (Rupert), Joe Flaherty (William), Stephen E. Miller (Ernie), Cliff Solomon (Big Bear), Stephen Tobolowsky (Uncle Neil), and many others. The script was written by Tom Green and Derek Harvie. Original music is by Mike Simpson. Tom Green directed.
FREDDY GOT FINGERED is a very brave and original exercise in extremely bad taste. It has pushed the boundaries of what a mainstream movie can get away with. There is much profanity (including well over 50 uses of "f***"), horse and elephant erections, Rip Torn's bare buttocks, lots of blood and guts, violence, anti-social/criminal behavior, and creative shock and gross out jokes. Where else can you find such outrageous entertainment?
