“You really can’t make up what I’m about to tell you,” North Carolina resident James Meyers says at the start of a YouTube video he posted this week.
His story, indeed a bizarre one, began as he was driving his daughter to school earlier this week.
Cops pulled Meyers over for a broken brake light, but when they checked out his details, something else came up.
“Sir, I don’t know how to tell you this, but there’s a warrant for your arrest from 2002,” one of the cops said. The officer explained to Meyers that he’d failed to return a VHS movie rental of Freddie Got Fingered, a widely panned gross-out comedy that currently scores a dismal 4.7 on IMDb, 11 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and picked up five Razzies (including for Worst Picture) soon after release.
Meyers shock wasn’t from the unpleasant reminder that he’d rented such a dismal movie, but that he was being arrested for not returning the rental. It happened 14 years ago, and the store in Kannapolis, north-east of Charlotte, doesn’t even exist anymore.
The officers let him take his daughter to school so long as he visited the cop shop later the same day. Meyers turned up thinking he’d be able to quickly settle the issue, but instead he was cuffed and taken to a magistrate’s office.
Officials have ordered the shocked caterer and part-time DJ to attend court on April 27 to answer the charge of “failure to return rental property.”
Having heard the news, the star of Freddy Got Fingered – Tom Green – hit Twitter to express his surprise (again, not that someone had rented the movie, but that…..well, you know).
The comedian tweeted, “I just saw this and I am struggling to believe it is real.”
I just saw this and I am struggling to believe it is real. https://t.co/GrTXoUj29X
— Tom Green (@tomgreenlive) March 24, 2016
When Green heard Meyers could be fined up to $200, he told the NY Daily News he’ll be happy to pay it for him, “just for the principle of the thing.” As for the arrested man, he said he watched the movie again this week (presumably not his unreturned VHS copy) and found it hilarious.
Meyers isn’t the first to find himself in hot water over failing to return a movie from years ago. In 2014, for example, a woman from neighboring South Carolina spent a night in the slammer for failing to return a movie she rented nine years earlier.
