Trash Humpers (2009)
Director: Harmony Korine
With: Harmony Korine, Rachel Korine, Charles Ezell, Chris Gantry, etc.
Harmony Korine is a talented film-maker with a big flaw: he can’t get past his need to be shocking and/or confounding to his audience. Unless I miss my guess at just who his audience is. There are those who consider him a genius, and not a misguided snotnose.
He is like a kid who writes dirty words on walls with brilliant penmanship. No matter how admirable the craft, it’s still just a bunch of self-indulgent crap.
He wrote the screenplay for Kids, a shocking but real wake-up call to a generational subculture that spread AIDS with amoral disinterest. Then he directed Gummo (1998), Julien Donkey Boy (1999) and Mr. Lonely (2007). The first two are grotesquely shocking, even for a jaded old cynic like me. Mr. Lonely was a surprisingly tender, almost sentimental, film about a Michael Jackson impersonator who falls in with a group of celebrity impersonators, leading to a crushing ending.
Now comes Trash Humpers, and Korine is back to obscure and offensive, but this movie is also dull and pointless. It is a series of vignettes in the lives (?) of three, or more, weirdos in Nashville’s seamier side who literally hump garbage cans. They also mime sex acts with, among other things, mailboxes and trees. All this while wearing hideous old-person masks.
When they are not doing this, they are destroying things for no apparent reason: fluorescent tubes, old TV sets and boom-boxes, anything they can smash. There are also rambling pseudo-cool monologues by various low-life characters and interactions with scantily-dressed women, whom they spank on their bare tushes, and aimless tossing of firecrackers.
It was the longest 77 minutes I have spent since my root canal. And, it is shot on VHS tape to increase the grungy look of the thing, as though the story weren’t enough.
This is not the hipster underground of, say, Stan Brakhage or the Kuchar brothers, although it resembles these superficially, nor the wink-wink, trashy world of John Waters, who is Orson Welles compared to this film. It is the prank of a talented brat who is out to prove something, I guess. All he proved to me is that someone needs to get him some help.
Of course, if you think the poster is funny or artistic, you may want to go see it.
F-