Freaked

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
1993

Freaked
Tom Stern, Alex Winter
USA, 1993
80 minutes
Colour/35mm
Production Company: Tommy Productions
Producer: Harry J. Ufland, Mary Jane Ufland
Screenplay: Tim Burns, Tom Stern, Alex Winter
Cinematography: Jamie Thompson
Editor: Malcom Campbell
Production Designer: Catherine Hardwicke
Sound: Lee Orloff, Michael Hilkene
Music: Kevin Kiner, Karyn Rachtman
Principal Cast: Alex Winter, Randy Quaid, William Sadler, Megan Ward, Keanu Reeves, Michael Stoyanov, Mr. T, Brooke Shields, Morgan Fairchild, Larry “Bud” Melman, Bobcat Goldthwait

It’s a loopy rollercoaster ride to the farthest galaxies of genetic mutation! It’s a gag-filled farce, taking on the best game shows of seventies TV! It’s a surreal visual poem culled from the annals of the grooviest underground comic books of the sixties! It’s an environmentalist epic! It’s a beautiful love story! It’s Mr. T in a dress! Freaked is the ultimate post-MTV mind-fuck, dropping mass cultural references like rabbit pellets and bringing new meaning to the concept of makeup design. Co-directors Tom Stern and Alex Winter have combined a thoroughly deranged script, a fabulous cast and a speed-of-light editing style to make the most outrageous film in recent memory.

Ricky Coogan (Winter) is a celebrity pitchman for evil conglomerate EES (Everything Except Shoes). With his buddy Ernie, he junkets to South America to promote Noxon, the company’s toxic bio-genetic fertilizer. Soon after arrival, they encounter Julie, a beautiful feminist, and stumble into a freak-show circus run by a demented ex-patriot Texan, Elijah C. Skuggs (Randy Quaid). Before they know it, the kids have been turned into hideous mutants: Ricky becomes an egregious beast-boy and the chauvinist Ernie is fused with Julie into Siamese twins forever locked in a Three Stooges debate on political correctness. They are corralled in with the other mutants and guarded by two ultra-menacing Rastafarian eyeballs, until Ricky cooks up a plan to escape, return to normal and get back at the incorrigible corporate giant who sent him there. Winter and Stern have developed a sizable cult following with their disturbed shorts, Squeal of Death and Aisles of Doom. The promise represented by those slices of gruesomeness has blossomed in a way no one could have imagined. No one human, that is.
—Noah Cowan