Freddy Got Fingered Won Five Razzies. It's Better Than You Think, and Tom Green Showed Up

Freddy Got Fingered came out on April 20, 2001, which tells you something about the target audience, and it was received the way a skunk is received at a wedding. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 12 percent. Metacritic gives it a 13. Opening-night audiences gave it a C-minus on CinemaScore, and those were the people who had paid to be there, which is the crowd most inclined to lie to itself.

The plot, if that's the word, follows Gord Brody, a 28-year-old unemployed cartoonist played by Tom Green, who leaves his parents' house in Portland for Los Angeles to sell a cartoon called Zebras in America. He fails, comes home, and wages total war on his father, played by Rip Torn with the energy of a man who has been told the cameras are off. Green directed it and co-wrote it with Derek Harvie, and 20th Century Fox handed him $14 million, which in hindsight is the most avant-garde decision anyone made in the whole picture.

Roger Ebert gave it zero stars and put it on his list of most hated films. The movie made about $14.3 million worldwide, so it managed to lose money while breaking even, like a man who sells his car to pay for gas. Then it won five Golden Raspberry Awards out of eight nominations, including Worst Picture, Worst Actor, Worst Director and Worst Screenplay, plus Worst Screen Couple for Green and any animal he abuses. That last category had a lot of candidates.

Here is where it gets interesting. Most people who win a Razzie hide under the bed. Green went to the ceremony and accepted in person, and joked that he deserved the trophies no more than the other nominees. You can't insult a man who arrives at his own roast with a covered dish. He had made exactly the movie he meant to make, and the only people confused about it were the critics.

Because it wasn't a failed comedy. It was an anti-comedy, a long, deranged prank on the idea of a studio picture, released by a studio. A. O. Scott of The New York Times saw something in it at the time and said so, guardedly, the way you'd admit to liking a cousin. Nathan Rabin later gave it a rave in his Secret Success column at The A.V. Club. Vadim Rizov defended it for IFC. And Chris Rock, who knows a thing or two about what's funny, has named it one of his favorite films. When Chris Rock and the Razzies disagree, I know which one I'd hire to write my eulogy.

It also found its people the old-fashioned way. Home video turned the $14 million loss into a profit, with DVD sales reported at about $24.3 million. It's a cult classic now, which is what we call a movie that was right too early. The same thing happens to prophets and to men who say the bridge is out.

Green has said for years he'd like to put out a director's cut, and the studio has never handed over the footage. Picture it: a quarter-century later, there's apparently more of this thing in a vault somewhere, and Fox would rather sit on it than let it out. You don't guard a dud like that. You guard something that scares you.

Every generation needs a movie its parents walk out of. The trouble is the parents keep writing the reviews.