Every once and a while you stumble upon an
unknown flick where, after you've watched it, you can only say, "What the
fuck?" Even rarer, you stumble upon something that not only gets you to
say "What the fuck?" but also seriously wonder, "Why the fuck is
this movie unknown?" Freaked is one of those rare movies. It is, hands
down, prime cult-film material — and funny as hell on top of that. How can a
movie this good be so fucking unknown? Well, if you go online and do a little
research, some assumptions are easy to draw: a vanity production of the
extreme, it not only failed to click with its supposed post-pubescent stoner
audience when first released, but the studio powers-that-be simply didn't know
what the fuck to do with a movie they didn't know why the fuck they let get
made in the first place.
That no one could figure out the
"why" behind Freaked back then is due primarily to both the short
memory of the industry and the penchant to run and take cover when a decision
goes wrong, for the "why the fuck" they greenlit the movie is easy enough to
ascertain. Simply, long ago but not too long before this movie, two guys starred
in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989 / trailer)
and, two years later, returned for a sequel named Bill & Ted's Bogus
Journey (1991 / trailer).
The films made a lot of money, and the studio probably hadn't yet realized that it was the
more 16 Magazine-friendly of the two — i.e., Keanu Reeves — who had a future, so
when the less 16 Magazine-friendly of the two — i.e., Alex Winter — came up
with this project, which pretty much looked like it was in the same vein as the
earlier two movies, they dished out an 11-million-dollar budget to Winter and
his two fellow cohorts from MTV's Idiot Box (1990-91 / trailer)
sketch comedy series, Tom Stern and Tim Burns. Only to then get a movie that they
didn't know what to do with or how to market, which bombed at the
pre-screenings, and then went on to earn less than $7,000 on its opening
weekend and topped out at under $30,000.
In all truth, in our book any movie that
blows an alleged one-million dollars for an un-credited appearance of Keanu
Reeves (or any name actor) in a role that almost any half-way professional
actor probably could've excelled at — Ortiz the Dog Boy — sort of deserves to
flop. (Why use a name actor if you aren't going to use the name?) That said, even movies like that deserve eventual reappraisal or
rediscovery if and when they are as surreally creative and off the wall and fun
and simply out there in deep space like this one. Freaked is an unknown absurdist classic, and one even with still-pertinent social commentary. The only problem
is that, as is the case when something is "unknown", no one seems to know it's out there. Yet.
The scattershot approach of Freaked is already to
be discerned in its opening credit sequence, which looks a bit like something a
computer-whiz and tasteless Ray Harryhausen
might have done had he dropped acid or wanted to ruin his career. (The homage
is obviously intentional, as the head of the Cyclops from The 7th Voyage of
Sinbad [1958 / trailer],
among other pop-culture references, makes a cameo in a later transformation
sequence.) Stealing all the un-filmed funny sequences from movies like Freaks
(1932 / trailer)
or Freakmaker
(1974) or Island of Lost Souls
(1932), Freaked tosses them in with
everything and the kitchen sink, as well as a seemingly game casting (Mr T as
the Bearded Lady? Genius!), into a blender. The result is, unbelievably enough,
a socially critical movie that takes the piss out of everything, even its own
criticism. Not everything hits the mark (there's an adolescent gay stereotype
joke, for example, that is less funny than predictable and was already dated when the flick was released), but the sheer barrage
of visual and verbal ridiculousness of the disordered insanity should keep
most connoisseurs of filmic madness happy.
The plot is a variant of taking the wrong
turn-off trope more common to horror movies like Tourist Trap
(1979), Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977 / trailer), and some thousand other films, but told mostly in flashback to the vapid TV hostess Skye Daley (Brooke
Shields, of Alice Sweet Alice [1976 / trailer]). Brainless Hollywood celebrity Ricky Coogin (Winter), hired by the
unscrupulous conglomerate E.E.S. ("Everything Except Shoes") as
spokesman for their highly-toxic Zygrot-24 fertilizer, travels down to the
small South American country of Santa Flan with his yes-man buddy Ernie
(Michael Stoyanov). They are joined by the pretty activist Julie (Megan Ward of
Wes Craven's
Don't Look Down [1998], Albert Pyun's Arcade [1993 / trailer],
and more), and make the fatal mistake of stopping off at a roadside attraction,
Freek Land, run by the decidedly mad Elijah C. Skuggs (real-life whackhead Randy Quaid of Parents
[1989 / trailer],
Hard Rain
[1998], Bug Buster
[1998] and way more). Too late, they find out that he not only displays his
"human oddities", he makes them....
At a tight 80-minute running time — the
studio supposedly cut about 11 minutes — Freaked goes fast and furious with the
comic jabs, absurdist humor, tasteless jokes, simple weirdness, and total idiocy. If the
concept of Mr T the Bearded Lady seems too mainstream for you, how about two
Rastafarian eyeballs as compound guards? Or an absolutely gross-looking and
drooling & puss-shooting Ricky Coogin becoming a freak-show hit by
performing Shakespeare's Richard III? Or, among the transformed freaks, a hammer that used
to be a wrench? Special mention should perhaps be given to Randy Quaid, who for
a change manages to play demented (and dim) without killing the movie — but
then, everything is so demented in Freaked that his character simply fits in
perfectly.
Freaked — help make it the cult film it
deserves to be: watch it now with some friends and spread the word that there
is one wacked-out, fun movie out there.
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