In theaters

FREDDY GOT FINGERED, directed by Tom Green, written by Green and Derek Harvie. 93 minutes. Rated R.

At the start of Tom Green’s morbidly self-conscious “Freddy Got Fingered,” pop culture’s new raunch icon, the 28-year-old Gord Brody (Green), has moved out of his parents’ basement and is about to leave for Los Angeles, where he hopes to hit it big as an animator of pointless, grotesque cartoons based on his pointless, grotesque life.

Just as Gord drives away, his father, Jim (Rip Torn), shouts after him with barely restrained glee: “Make your daddy proud, son! Make him proud!” to which Gord replies, “Oh, I will, daddy. I will….”

For anyone familiar with MTV’s popular “The Tom Green Show,” a venue Green often uses to humiliate his own parents, the set-up is clear, but even Green’s fans might be surprised at how far this nontalent is willing to go in his curious quest for fame.

Indeed, literally seconds after Gord leaves home, the film, for no explicable reason other than to allow Green his mark on the raunch genre, cuts to him pulling alongside a farm, jumping over a fence and rushing toward an aroused stallion, which he stimulates for the sheer hell of it in the film’s first of several scenes featuring bestiality.

On talk shows and in interviews, Green has bragged that the horse and its equipment are real, which they certainly appear to be, but is this really something to brag about? Apparently it is for Green, whose first time as a director finds him struggling – sometimes literally sweating – to maintain just these sorts of stunts and cultural lows.

In scenes that have nothing to do with the film’s alleged plot – Gord striking out on his own – audiences are treated to a whole host of offenses: Gord delivering a stillborn baby, biting off its umbilical cord and then twirling the child above his head while the infant’s blood-splattered mother screams in fear for herself and her child; Gord licking and sucking on the compound fracture in his friend’s broken leg; Gord beating a woman’s paralyzed legs with a cane in an effort to “make them tingle” and bring her to orgasm; Gord spraying his father with elephant semen; and Gord taking a knife to roadkill and smearing himself with deer intestines before wearing the carcass and getting struck down by a truck.

Is this funny? No, but it’s absolutely inept and desperate, an embarrassing display of one man’s miscalculation of his audience – and, more importantly, his gross miscalculation of himself. To succeed in the raunch genre, it’s true that one needs to up the ante, but Green doesn’t seem to know that upping the ante means making the scene riotously funny – and not just crude for the sake of being crude. When people weren’t walking out at my screening, some did laugh during the film’s more absurd moments, but their laughter was never light. Instead, it was uncomfortable.

About the film’s title – in case you were wondering, the title is derived from the humor Green finds in child molestation, which is featured in a throwaway story line that deserves no further mention here.

In the end, Tom Green’s movie isn’t so much a comedy as it is an assault, which, I suppose, is exactly what Green set out to do. Does that make his film successful? On one level, sure it does. But on another level, the one that matters, “Freddy Got Fingered” presents Green as the real joke, a man who takes 93 minutes to showcase just how unskilled he is as a comedian, an actor, a writer and a director – and just how unlikable he is as a person.

And that, I’m fairly certain, was something he never set out to do.

Grade: BOMB

On video and DVD

LITTLE NICKY, directed by Steven Brill. Written by Adam Sandler, Tim Herlihy and Brill. 93 minutes. PG-13.

Continuing on with the raunch, there’s Steven Brill’s “Little Nicky,” a rotten film that should have been sent to bed without a budget since it was, after all, sent to the studio without a script.

The film, which stars Adam Sandler as the retarded, lisping spawn of Satan (Harvey Keitel), pulls off the surprising feat of making the entire oeuvre of Sandler’s films seem like little diamonds – precious gems of nuanced, comedic performances deserving of a second glance.

Since that’s clearly not the case, one can imagine how bad “Little Nicky” is.

The film’s plot, such as it is, pits Little Nicky against his two brothers, Adrian (Rhys Ifans) and Cassius (Tiny Lister), both of whom have launched a plan to overthrow their father and take over Hell. It’s up to the hobbled, insecure Nicky to find his inner demons and thwart each brother, while also reacting in stupefied wonderment to the film’s never-ending barrage of dirty jokes.

Parents should take note: “Little Nicky” may sport a PG-13 rating, but when you consider what the film does with pineapples and Adolph Hitler – not to mention what it does with the man who forms bare breasts on his head – it nevertheless deserves an R.

Grade: F

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays in Style, Thursdays in the scene, Tuesdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5” and Thursdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5:30” on WLBZ-2 and WCSH-6. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com