GIVE 'FREDDY' AN 'F' ON ALL COUNTS.

Byline: Glenn Whipp Film Critic

The funniest thing about Tom Green's sick new movie ``Freddy Got Fingered'' comes not from Green, but from the MPAA. Explaining the reason for rating (rather generously, I might add) the film R, the MPAA notes the movie's ``crude, sexual and bizarre humor.''

An R rating for bizarreness?

Well, you be the judge. Do you want the following images whirling around inside your head (or the cranium of your teen-ager) for as long as it takes to ease the pain of memory?

Tom Green swinging a newborn baby around by its umbilical cord, blood splattering all over hospital walls and the mother.

Green gutting a roadkill deer and dancing with its carcass on top of his head.

Green caning the legs of his paraplegic girlfriend (Marisa Coughlan) in order to sexually stimulate her.

I could go on and on and on. (The movie certainly does.) The point isn't that ``Freddy Got Fingered'' is offensive in a way that will leave your jaw scraping the theater floor time and time again. It's brutally unfunny. Someone, somewhere might be able to take a dicey subject like child molestation and fashion some black humor from it. Maybe in more talented hands the sight of 70-year-old Rip Torn's blindingly white backside would be funny, as would his character's repeated (everything in this movie is repeated) pleas for sodomy.

Green, however, fails on every level here. He directed and co-wrote the movie and stars as its hero, Gord, a 28-year-old unemployed dreamer who lives in his parents' basement. A little of Green goes a long way. Spending 90 minutes trapped with him is like listening to a radio station that plays ``Who Let the Dogs Out'' 24 hours a day.

On his MTV program, some of Green's gross-out stunts were funny simply because they were (more or less) real and you couldn't believe they were actually happening. Take away that spontaneity, add scripted artifice and Green simply seems pitifully desperate, willing to sink to any level to provoke his audience.

The cumulative effect certainly is more original than anything in the appallingly bad string of infantile comedies (``Say It Isn't So,'' ``Tomcats,'' ``Saving Silverman,'' ``Joe Dirt,'' etc., etc.) that studios have been mercilessly sending our way this year. (It isn't every day you see an actor washed away in a sea of elephant semen.) But it's original only in the perverse manner that ``Battlefield Earth'' was last year. You watch aghast at how gruesomely awful it is.

Near the end of the movie, an extra holds up a sign that reads: ``When the (bleep) is this movie going to end?'' Short answer: not soon enough.

``FREDDY GOT FINGERED''

(Rated R: crude, sexual and bizarre humor and strong language)

The stars: Tom Green, Rip Torn, Julie Hagerty, Marisa Coughlan.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Tom Green. Written by Green and Derek Harvie. Released by 20th Century Fox.

Running time: One hour, 27 minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: One star

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Photo:

Comedian Tom Green explores the links between music and sausage as he tickles the ivories in ``Freddy Got Fingered,'' a film he co-wrote and directed.