A mix of monsters, madmen, corporate scumbags, and carnival freaks forms the basis of this high-powered, gloriously-warped comedy from co-directors Alex Winter (best known for his spaced-out BILL AND TED persona) and Tom Stern -- who worked together at NYU on their equally brilliant short pic, SQUEAL OF DEATH. Winter stars as Ricky Coogin, a spoiled Hollywood hack who journeys to the tiny country of Santa Flan as a spokesman for highly-toxic Zygrot-24 fertilizer. Accompanied by his best friend (BLOSSOM's Michael Stoyanov) and a pretty protester (Megan Ward), they make a pit stop at an isolated carny titled Freek Land. But this more-than-slightly-mad proprietor of this freak show, Elijah C. Skuggs (Randy Quaid), not only houses these human oddities -- he creates them in his makeshift lab, with the aid of the deadly Zygrot. Taken prisoner, Coogin's ever-bickering companions are transformed into siamese twins, while Coogin is transformed into a hunchbacked Beast Boy who squirts green puss from his pores and whose face makes people projectile vomit. Then we meet the rest of the menagerie, which includes a Giant Nose, a Cow Man, Mr. T as a Bearded Lady, Bob Goldthwait as the voice of a Sock Puppet Man, and the Dawgboy (a furry Keanu Reeves). Despite the grotesque Cougin winning over the locals patrons with a scene from RICHARD III, Skuggs plan is to change him into an "evil super-freek" and have him kill the others. If that wasn't enough, the story also crams in Giant Rastafarian eyeball guards, a halfpint Coogin fan who looks like Alfred E. Newman's illegit son, and Brooke Shield playing a vapid celebrity (oooh, that's a stretch). If memory serves me right, it's also the first movie to have a flashback from an inanimate object. This pic has everything any happily brain-damaged vidiot could ask for -- from its rude and crude sense of humor, to the deranged make-up from FX masters Steve Johnson and Screaming Mad George. The heavily-latexed cast gives their all, with Quaid a stand-out as the deliriously dim freakmaker. Let's not forget David Daniels' crazed animated credits and Henry Rollins' theme song, which sets the perfect, caustic mood for the flick to come. Low on subtlety, but high on laugh-out-loud insanity, this is an instant fave.

© 1994 by Steven Puchalski.