'Freddy Got Fingered' Director: Tom Green Stars: Tom Green, Rip Torn, Marisa Coughlan MPAA Rating: R, for crude sexual and bizarre humor, and for strong language MyPittsburghLIVE Cinema Listings Internet Movie Database Official Site CDnow Soundtrack

How else can you explain the success of Tom Green and the existence of his wretched first feature, "Freddy Got Fingered," which 20th Century Fox not only allowed him to star in, but also direct?

The result is a directorial debut so abysmal that it makes Chuck Barris' direction of "The Gong Show Movie" (1980) seem competent by comparison.

But I'm not the only one who hates it. Just ask theater manager Steve Fishman, who wisely walked out 38 minutes into this atrocity, and another couple in the same row who jumped ship 4 minutes later.

Thankfully, I've seen little of Green's work, but he's become very popular with the nation's youth through "The Tom Green Show" on MTV - a network which, in my opinion, has done more to ruin and coarsen our culture in the past 20 years than any single entity.

From what I've observed, Green isn't so much a comedian, but a gross-out artist who revels in aberrant, obscene behavior.

Green's very success among young people is one of the disturbing signs of the times, and he joins other offensive shock artists such as Eminem, Marilyn Manson, Madonna and various gangsta rappers in the category of pop cultural icons who should crawl back under the rocks from which they emerged.

For decades now, you've heard adults complaining, "Nothing's sacred anymore." But what might have been an exaggeration in the past has become absolutely true thanks to the aforementioned celebrities and their ilk.

As directed and co-written by Green, "Freddy Got Fingered" is a stupid, disgusting and surprisingly bloody movie which makes light of various forms of cruelty.

Green plays a 28-year-old bozo named Gord Brody who dreams of becoming a professional animator with his own cartoon strip, but still lives in his parents basement, much to the chagrin of his long-suffering father (Rip Torn).

Dad, you see, wishes Gord would be more like his 25-year-old brother, the Freddy of the title, a conventional young man who works in a bank.

But gags, not plot, are all that matter in "Freddy Got Fingered," and here are some of the knee-slappers you'll find in this masochistic stinkbomb:

Green takes the intestines out of a dead deer and puts the skin over his body; a man breaks his ankle so badly that the bone protrudes through the skin, while Green proceeds to lick the wound; and a little boy's mouth gets bloody and he cries in pain after getting hit in the mouth with a baseball.

Laughing yet?

But that's not all, we're treated to Green delivering a baby then twirling the newborn over his head by its umbilical cord; Green falsely accusing his father of child molestation; a wheelchair-ridden woman (Marisa Coughlan) who becomes sexually aroused by having her legs whipped; and abused children confined to a home where they're allowed to watch a violent movie with a woman being tortured.

I use these examples not to give away the movie, but to show parents and discriminating adults what kind of sewage Hollywood is making these days.

Good taste and high standards have all but disappeared in the quest for a quick buck.

It's really depressing to when you realize how far movies have sunk in the past 15 to 20 years. We've actually reached the point where movies once considered the worst of their respective years ("Ishtar," "Cannonball Run 2," "The Bonfire of the Vanities") now seem tolerable upon reflection.