You can finally watch Freddy Got Fingered on The Criterion Channel

Much has been said, over the last 20-plus years, about Tom Green’s 2001 comedy Freddy Got Fingered—and much of it has been stridently, burn-the-house-down levels negative. (Roger Ebert’s famous pan remains a masterpiece of the form, deriding Green for “doing things that a geek in a carnival sideshow would turn down” and drubbing the film as a “vomitorium.”) But whether you consider the movie to be a subversive and groundbreaking piece of surrealist art, or just drek where Rip Torn gets drenched in elephant semen, one thing is now undeniable: Freddy Got Fingered will soon be airing on The Criterion Channel.

Now, to be fair, this move doesn’t so much represent a wildly aggressive swing from the programmers of the streaming service, as it does a bit of inventive stunt-broadcasting: Freddy Got Fingered is being added to the collection (but not The Collection, to be clear) as part of a block of programming next month celebrating the Razzies, the low-hanging fruit of annual bad movie commentary. (Presumably because The Golden Raspberries themselves are coming up in March, timed as ever to the Oscars, to which they have ever parasitically clung.)

True to form, though, Criterion’s picks for its “And The Razzie Goes To…” block are at least culled from the more interesting selections from that ignominious pile: Several films that have had major critical re-appraisals (including Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate and Elaine May’s Ishtar) are in the collection… alongside movies that haven’t had that kind of retrospective recognition. (Guy Ritchie’s Madonna vehicle Swept Away and 2003's Gigli, for instance.) Even there, Freddy Got Fingered sits out at the divisive edge: There are still people who absolutely deride Green’s 87-minute parade of grotesqueries, even as its influence has spread out into a much wider array of “anti-comedies.” And now you can watch it on the same streaming service that offers up classic Jane Russell movies and a healthy collection of the finest foreign film. The internet, sometimes it’s alright.