Freddy Got Fingered

Hey, you know what's funny? False accusations of child molestation. That's just the most hilarious way to get back at your father for being mean to you because you're a hopeless screw-up. At least, that's what Tom Green seems to think.

Green is that MTV personality who takes a video camera out into the world to record himself accosting embarrassed strangers and performing gross-out stunts for the amusement of easily entertained viewers. He wrote, directed and stars in "Freddy Got Fingered," a lose collection of sub-par Green gags orbiting around a 28-year-old unemployed nitwit whose dad (Rip Torn) hates him because, well, he's a worthless human being who goes out of his way to make Dad ashamed of him.

Aww, poor Tom. He's so misunderstood.

The plot, what there is of it, concerns Green's dreams of being a Hollywood animator. But who cares about that stuff when there's real live horses for him to masturbate on camera? No, I'm not kidding.

It's no surprise Green wrote himself a role where he fulfills his dream of becoming an animator by just acting like a jackass. I mean, it worked on 20th Century Fox. Some greedy idiot at that studio gave Green carte blanche to make his own movie, hoping brainwashed teenagers would flock to see it no matter how bad it might turn out to be. All I can say is, I hope that studio exec has been fired.

If there's one thing the movies of David Spade, Rob Schneider and Adam Sandler have proven, it's that just running around in front of a movie camera acting like Jerry Lewis after a lobotomy is not inherently funny. But those three guys are at least legitimate comedians who have been pretty hilarious when they're not foolishly trying to turn themselves into leading men. Tom Green is nothing but a walking, talking schtick.

Rare moments of this pathetic excuse for a movie are rescued by actors who know enough about comedy to play well off of Green's googly-eyed randomness. Anthony Michael Hall seems to enjoy his role as an "let's do lunch" animation producer who belittles another cartoonist by yelling "I've got 12 Korean teenagers in a cage that can draw a dog in a cape!" Green's new wife Drew Barrymore has an entertaining cameo as Hall's receptionist. And Marisa Coughlan, who stole scene after scene in "Teaching Mrs. Tingle," bests Green at his own game as his love interest -- a dipsy, hyperactive, nyuck-nyucking paraplegic who gets ravenously aroused by having her paralyzed legs whipped with bamboo canes. (No, really, it's funny.)

But to see her out-goof the one-trick Green, you have to sit through his self-indulgent, stomach-turning bits with bloody umbilical cords, animal carcasses and -- do I really need to go on?

Assuming, for a moment, that you are a Tom Green fan and that you've read this far, let me just note two things: 1) Only two scenes in the commercials are in the movie, and 2) after the screening I attended, I asked two friends who actually wanted to see this movie what they thought of it. Both said they wished they'd walked out in the middle.