A movie as crass and tasteless as Freaked shouldn’t have a 4K box set as beautiful as the one Umbrella and Drafthouse films recently released. But that’s the magic of physical media: Even a movie dumped in two theaters 30 years ago, featuring a man afflicted by an eternal flame of flatulence, can find its sickos on the video shelf. Freaked was the last gasp of an era when MTV gave a national audience to underground artists and weirdos, skaterats-turned-art-students, and Bill from Bill & Ted. Winter secured airtime on the network with a short-lived sketch series called The Idiot Box. Along with co-creator Tom Sterns, Winter leveraged the series’ cult success into a modestly budgeted feature. Freaked is a story not unlike “Weird Al” Yankovic’s UHF: A form-splitting comedy buried by a studio that rightfully thought, “Who the hell watches this stuff?” But Freaked also carries the flame-farted torch of movies like Gremlins 2 and Hellzapoppin’, rattling off Mad-inspired gags with boundless creativity and ingenious creature effects. For those on its wavelength, the mix of anarchic, sci-fi comedy and Cronenbergian body horror is cinematic perfection.
Freaked stars Winter as Hollywood slimeball Ricky Coogin, who finds a new low to sink to as the spokesperson for the toxic fertilizer Zygrot 24. En route to South America, where the product is causing a health crisis, Ricky gets waylaid by a freak show run by Elijah C. Skuggs (Randy Quaid, never better), who uses the fertilizer to turn people into hideous mutant freaks. After Skuggs transforms him into the half-gremlin Beast Boy, Ricky must organize his fellow freaks, including a self-confident Bearded Lady (Mr. T), a human worm (Derek McGrath), a sockpuppet (Bobcat Goldthwait), Ortiz “The Dog Boy” (Keanu Reeves), and an anthropomorphic cow boy (John Hawkes), to revolt against their captor.
Freaked wears its influences on its pus-stained sleeve. Zap Comix, SST Records, Sam Raimi, and Jake And The Fat Man were all swirling around the pop-culture-obsessed minds of its creators. But their anti-corporate cynicism and commitment to the premise belie the slacker-forward nature of Gen X; Freaked puts a lot of effort into something very dumb. Regardless of how many hours in the makeup chair it required, each pustulating creature effect follows any and every detour in hopes of finding a joke stupid or disgusting enough to justify it.
Appropriately, the box set doesn’t lack for distractions. The three-disc collections contain 4K and Blu-ray transfers, directors’ commentary, a copy of the shooting script, and a hardbound book of essays and art. There’s also a wealth of behind-the-scenes footage and reflections from Winter, Stern, co-writer Tim Burns, and production designer Catherine Hardwicke. There’s even a “rehearsal cut” of the film, which is simply a 90-minute script read that Winter suffered in full Beast Boy makeup. It’s an embarrassing amount of features for a movie that sold itself as “butt ugly but funny.” We’re lucky to have it.
Mary Kate Carr: Shiny Happy People: A Teenage Holy War
To my mind, the most prescient show that’s aired on television this year is the second season of Prime Video’s documentary series Shiny Happy People. In general, the show elucidates the particular encroaching Christofascist sensibility of the United States. Specifically, I watched the season shortly before the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and couldn’t help see the connection between the two. Though Kirk was not directly connected with Teen Mania Ministries (the subject of the second season), he’s referenced sporadically throughout, enough to make a case that Teen Mania was the antecedent to Turning Point USA. The pomp and circumstance of the memorial service put on in Kirk’s name bore inescapable similarities to the theatrics of Teen Mania’s “Acquire the Fire” and “Battle Cry” events.
Similar to Turning Point USA’s mission “to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government,” Teen Mania was conceived as a way to speak directly to Christian youth. Founder Ron Luce understood, as Kirk did, the potential power of indoctrinating impressionable young people. And evangelical Christian youth are particularly impressionable; former participants interviewed for the show reveal how sheltered they were from secular culture, how exciting “Acquire the Fire” seemed and how thrilling it was to be “called” to ministry. Before there was Kirk’s Turning Point Academy (an educational program for youth “focused on truth, goodness, and beauty, and RESTORING God as the foundation of education”), there was Luce’s Honor Academy. Luce professed much the same goals with Honor Academy, but as Shiny Happy People reveals, the program was traumatizing and exploiting its students.
There’s an echo of Luce, too, in TPUSA Faith’s mission to “engage, equip, and empower millions of grateful Americans who are prepared to defend our God-given rights.” Kirk’s vision of defending Christian values was ostensibly through debate. Luce’s was explicitly militant—as you might be able to guess from the season’s subtitle A Teenage Holy War. He put his young disciples through grueling physical training and harrowing war games, convincing them that they’d need to put their bodies on the line to combat the world’s hatred of Christians. As he built a literal army of zealous teens, Luce attracted the support of evangelical and conservative leaders like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Rick Santorum, and Sean Hannity (at its peak, the organization even got an endorsement from George W. Bush). In turn, he used his influence—and his army—to support Republican interests.
Teen Mania Ministries fell apart in the early 2000s after being accused of, among other things, spiritual abuse. That included drilling into his vulnerable charges that the best thing they could do for the cause was die. Participants recall not just wanting but actually expecting that they would someday be martyred for their beliefs. Their lives were the most sacred thing they could offer Jesus, yes, but Luce found that the image of a young, murdered Christian was extremely motivating to his flock, inspiring them to further Luce’s own spiritual and political crusade. Seeing the way the Christian right has taken up Kirk’s mantle in the time since his violent death, the ideas animating Luce’s project couldn’t be more relevant. If you want a peek inside the evangelical political playbook, Shiny Happy People season two is as good a place to start as any.
