The vitals:
Tuesday, 9/17
7:00 ~ Doors
7:30 ~ FREAKED

Think fast: you’re a major movie studio, the year is 1993, and youth culture is rapidly changing in a way you can't quite dig your hands into. What can you possibly do to capture this post-MTV alt-rock soft-punk teenage airwave zeitgeist? Well, if you're a major movie studio (which remember, you are), how about throwing 12 million dollars and total creative control at Bill from Bill & Ted?

Enter Freaked, the unholy blue-moon miracle child of freewheeling studio money and a creative team all too eager to spend it. Originally conceived as an “obscene, ultra-violent” horror film featuring the Butthole Surfers, Alex Winter and fellow co-creators of his MTV sketch show The Idiot Box retooled their idea into an irreverent comedy titled Hideous Mutant Freekz. This was the version greenlit with a licensed soundtrack and toy line, but some time and some personnel changes later, less-enthusiastic studio higher-ups buried the now retitled Freaked. They deemed it “too weird,” released the film on a mere two (!!) screens in the United States, and never spoke of Ricky Coogan or his mutant friends ever again.

However, you can't keep a good freak down. Thirty years later, Freaked plays like a lost masterpiece of bonehead ‘90s humor; a breathless and eager-to-please joke-a-second comedy trading in everything from sight gags to wordplay to moments of airplane-based slapstick unmatched until Freddy Got Fingered eight years later. The film's energy and enthusiasm are infectious, and its practical effects are so good you’ll need to wipe a tear from your anthropomorphic joint-smoking eye. There's truly nothing else on earth quite like Freaked: dumb, weird, goopy, tremendously funny, and probably a miracle. They don't make ‘em like this anymore, probably because they didn't even make ‘em like this back then.

—Morgan Hyde

SEE YOU AT THE MOVIES
🔮