freaked

Plot summary

The film opens with celebrity Ricky Coogan (Alex Winter) appearing on a talk show called The Skye Daily Show hosted by Skye Daily (Brooke Shields). The entire movie is essentially a flashback of Coogan's adventures on the island of Santa Flan as he is telling his story to Skye Daily.

Coogan accepts a job promoting a dangerously toxic fertilizer called zygrot-24 made by slimy mega-corporation EES (Everything Except Shoes) in the remote tropics of Santa Flan (named after "the patron saint of creamy desserts"). Coogan and his friend Ernie (Michael Stoyanov) fly to Santa Flan, and cross paths with a hard-willed, and attractive, young environmentalist named Julie (Megan Ward). Coogan and Ernie fool Julie into thinking they are environmentalists as well and she agrees to join them on a trip to an anti-zygrot-24 demonstration.

The trio decide to take a detour to see a freak show, and they wind up in the clutches of proprietor Elijah C. Skuggs (Randy Quaid). Skuggs has a vat full of the toxic fertilizer and uses it to morph Coogan, Ernie, and Julie into hideous freaks to become part of his show. Julie and Ernie are merged into a bizarre composite of the two, since they hate each other they become a one body two stooges. Ricky is mutated into a hideous thing with half his face that of a monster. Incorporated into the freak show they meet Skuggs's freaks. An army boy, Dog Boy (an un-credited Keanu Reeves in heavy makeup who had previously acted alongside Alex Winter in the Bill & Ted series) who is a canine hero, wanting to free his brethren. Mister T is the Bearded Lady, androgynous yet virile at the same time. Bobcat Goldthwait is Sockhead, a man who has a sock puppet for head and a professor turned into a giant worm who misses his arms. Not wanting to spend the rest of his career playing the leading role in a freak show, Coogan plots a daring escape with the other freaks.

Trivia

• During his interview with Skye Daily, Ricky says he saw Return to the Blue Lagoon on the plane to Santa Flan. Skye responds "Oh, I heard that sucked." Return to the Blue Lagoon is the sequel to The Blue Lagoon, in which Brooke Shields played Emmeline Lestrange.