Grade: F

The ability to enjoy MTV comedian Tom Green is an acquired condition, and on the basis of his first name-above-the-title movie, you’d be awfully lucky never to be infected by it. In “Freddy Got Fingered,” Green goes the auteur route–he not only stars, but co-wrote and directed the malignant thing. He proves himself a triple threat indeed: a more egregious example of the three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule hasn’t hit the screen since the heyday of Jerry Lewis, who at least wasn’t viciously obnoxious, as Green is. The result is unremittingly dreadful, a thoroughly rancid lump of cinematic sludge, and Green, who was barely tolerable in a secondary role in “Road Trip,” comes across as an utterly loathsome leading man. “Freddy Got Fingered” is the bottom of the gross-out barrel.

The threadbare plot is nothing but a slender frame on which to hang a succession of bits showcasing Green’s peculiarly grotesque brand of humor–most of them involving crude sexual gags, bloody internal organs, pointless violence, idiotic non-sequiturs, and ostentatiously bizarre moments. The narrative, such as it is, has to do with a self-obsessed, imbecilic slacker–what else?–named Gord Brody (Green) whose rough-voiced father Jim (Rip Torn) opposes his boy’s desire to become an animator and tries to force him into a real job. The complications that ensue are always vile and never amusing. (Toward the close the focus of the purported jokes becomes a false accusation of child molestation–thus the title–which, even in this context, represents a new nadir of tastelessness.) The aim is apparently to be both shocking and hilarious, but the picture succeeds at neither–it’s merely ugly and revolting (as well as excruciatingly boring).

The action involves not only Green, whose character is apparently supposed to be endearing as well as odd but only manages to be unpleasantly strange, and Torn, who looks acutely uncomfortable as the pompous dad, but also Harland Williams (the singularly unfunny chap who bombed as a comic lead himself in “Rocket Man”) and Julie Hagerty (as Gord’s simpering dumbbell of a mother). Other performers trapped in the mess include Marisa Coughlin as a handicapped girl who’s unaccountably attracted to Gord (cue lots of anti-PC “humor,” as well as an unconscionable amount of smarmy sex-and-sadism jokes), Eddie Kaye Thomas as the younger Brody son (the “Freddy” of the title), and Anthony Michael Hall, memory of whose recent decent turn in “The Caveman’s Valentine” is pretty much obliterated by his embarrassing turn here as a TV honcho. There are a couple of cameos better left unmentioned.

It may be Freddy who’s fingered in the title, but it’s the unlucky audience that’s been given a cinematic middle digit by Green in the form of this atrocious movie. If there were a grade lower than an F, Green’s gruesome opus would certainly deserve it.