YMMV / Freaks

• Awesome Music: The loving cup song - not a masterpiece of composition, maybe, but it will haunt you, and what more can you ask?
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Hercules lecturing Cleo about the health benefits of fruit.
  • Prince Randian, after rolling a cigarette with his lips, yells "I CAN DO ANYTHING WITH MY MOUTH!" for no apparent reason. It could be argued as foreshadowing for his appearance in the finale, but it's still bizarre.
• Fair for Its Day: The titular Freaks are presented as off-putting and creepy in their way, particularly at the signature "One of us" scene and at the ending when they enact their revenge. Cleo's fate of becoming a freak herself is treated as a horrifying punishment, which it nevertheless is. But at the same time, they're unquestionably portrayed as good, friendly people who attempt to stay upbeat and positive in spite of the prejudice they have to deal with every day. The villains of the story are two traditionally handsome, gorgeous, "Normal" people whose beauty is quickly revealed to be only skin deep. Several of the freaks are also portrayed by real disabled sideshow performers.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The scenes with Daisy and Violet Hilton become tragic when you remember how their lives eventually ended — Daisy died of the Hong Kong flu and Violet died two to four days later. Keep in mind, they were still attached. They also had incredibly tragic lives before and after the film.
• Karmic Overkill: While Hercules and Cleopatra's actions are undeniably represehensible, some feel that the punishment the titular freaks enact on the villains are just as if not worse. Lampshaded in the ending where it's revealed that Hans just wanted to demand the bottle of poison from Cleopatra, not for her to be mutilated.
• Memetic Mutation: "One of us! One of us! Gooble-garble gooble-garble! We accept her, we accept her!"
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Cleopatra and Hercules' attempted murder of Hans and Venus toward the end.
  • For many viewers however, the Freaks cross this line by enacting their horrific revenge on Hercules and Cleopatra. Hans didn't want the freaks to mutilate Hercules and Cleopatra either as shown in the ending.
• Narm: The ending has a character played by Prince Randian - who's capable of rolling cigarettes with his mouth and is shown to do so - worming his way towards a villain with a knife in his mouth. With context, it may come across as silly, but he's known to be capable of handling things more complex than that and he's almost certainly very much capable of using it. Without context...it's very silly, as his skill can't be known to someone who hasn't seen it.
  • The 90's comic series reveal of Cleo after the freaks are done with her, as shown on the Nightmare Fuel page; while certainly a horrific and nightmarish fate for the character, the design looks far more cartoonish than the movie version, making it hard to take seriously. Arguably, the leadup to this scene, with Cleo trying to flee on her mutilated hands and feet through the rain, screaming for help, and almost catching the attention of a passing car, only to vanish between one panel and the next, is much scarier.
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: Although the film was to have 30 minutes cut from it after the test screening, there was no way to do so before its premiere in Fox Theatre in San Diego. This version was a Box Office smash, as crowds lined up down the street to see it, and it broke the theatre's house record. When word spread that the film was going to be edited, the theatre advertised "Your last opportunity to see Freaks in its uncensored form."
• No Yay: The actors playing Hans and Freida are siblings. Knowing this makes the fact that they end up together sort of uncomfortable for some viewers.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Harry Earles (Hans) would go on to play one of the Lollipop Guild dancers in The Wizard of Oz (the one in the blue shirt).
  • Angeleno, another of the little people, is the top half of MasterBlaster in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.
• Signature Line:
  ONE OF US! ONE OF US!
• Ugly Cute: The Pinheads. Generally, all the freaks here are Ugly Cute, with the exceptions of the adorable Hans, the beautiful Frieda, Frances, Daisy, and Violet and the uncommonly handsome Johnny Eck. Josephine-Joseph isn't too hard on the eyes, either.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Some viewers, ones that were even fairly sympathetic towards the titular Freaks, felt all sympathy for them completely evaporate after their justified, yet nonetheless horrific punishment on Hercules and Cleopatra. This is lampshaded in-universe where all Hans wanted to do to was to demand Cleopatra turn over the bottle of poison and not have her mutilated.
• Vindicated by History: At first dismissed as a horrific Exploitation Film with reviews at the time condemning it and using dehumanizing language in regard to the freaks, Freaks has since earned a cult following in the sixties counter-culture movement and is today recognized as a classic, particularly for its sympathetic portrayal of the titular "freaks".

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