#2,966. Trash Humpers (2009) - The Films of Harmony Korine

 

When his film Trash Humpers premiered at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival, director Harmony Korine warned the audience that its title should be taken literally (“I named it Trash Humpers because I didn’t want to fool anyone”, he later said in an interview).

Sure enough, the opening images are of the three main characters: Buddy (Brian Kotzur), Momma (Rachel Korine), and Travis (Travis Nicholson), all wearing masks that make them appear elderly, grinding into trash cans and humping fences. One even fellates a tree branch!

But they’re just getting warmed up.

From there, we follow the characters as they destroy televisions and boom boxes, vandalize public property, and mock a child as he plays basketball. They take in two men (Kevin Guthrie and Charles Ezell) wearing what appear to be hospital gowns. The group forces the two to cook pancakes, then makes them eat the pancakes after dousing them with dish soap. The trio also meets a crossdressing singer (Chris Gantry) who performs for them. Before long, the singer is lying dead on their kitchen floor, the back of his head smashed in with a hammer.

Baby dolls appear throughout, and are also destroyed with hammers, closed up in plastic bags, and tied up with rope before being dragged from the back of their bicycles.

Trash Humpers is chaos to the hundredth power.

Korine shot the entirety of Trash Humpers on low-quality VHS, then edited the film on two VCRs, giving it a documentary / found footage vibe (Korine himself plays the fourth member of the group, Herve, who is the one supposedly working the camera. He is seldom seen, often making his presence known by way of grunts and shrill laughter). Because of this, the images are often grainy and hard to see, and the editing far from smooth (by design, I’m sure). The audio also suffers from time to time, tinny at its best and, at its worst, indecipherable.

Still, like Gummo before it, Korine’s Trash Humpers offers a fascinating glimpse of the urban landscape (the film was shot in the seedier neighborhoods of Nashville, Tennessee), and how a group of depraved individuals fend off boredom by unleashing anarchy. Whether it be humping a trash can at night under a streetlight or defecating in front of someone’s garage door, there seems to be no line these derelicts won’t cross. Yet there is a sense of freedom about it all, both the freedom to do as they please and the freedom of not giving a damn what anyone else thinks about it.

As with Gummo, Trash Humpers falls somewhere between art and, well… trash! And it’s the combination of the two that kept me watching.
Rating: 7 out of 10

#998. Gummo (1997) - The Films of Harmony Korine

Directed By: Harmony Korine

Starring: Jacob Sewell, Nick Sutton, Lara Tosh




Tag line: "Prepare to visit a town you'd never want to call home"

Trivia:  Harmony Korine and his cameraman were frequently chased out of locations by angry fathers with shotguns, who suspected them of making child porn






Opinions vary on director Harmony Korine’s 1997 debut feature, Gummo. Time Out called the film “breathtakingly original, and absolutely true to the times”, while Ken Hanke, writing for the Mountain Express in Asheville, NC, went so far as to declare it “the vilest waste of 2 hours of my life”. 

So, is Gummo a work of art, or exploitative trash? 

Is there a deeper meaning hidden in this tale of society’s outcasts, or is the movie the equivalent of poking fun at circus freaks?

Gummo has no story, per se, but follows the exploits of several young people living in the town of Xenia, Ohio, which, years earlier, was nearly destroyed by a tornado. 

Tummler (Nick Sutton) and Solomon (Jacob Reynolds) are glue-sniffing teenagers who kill stray cats and sell their carcasses to the local butcher. Dot (Chloe Sevigny) and her younger sisters Helen (Carisa Glucksman) and Darby (Darby Dougherty) pass the time listening to music, playing with their cat, and putting electrical tape over their nipples to make them more erect. 

There’s also a boy wearing pink bunny ears (Jacob Sewell) who makes the occasional appearance.

All of these characters seem to be drifting aimlessly through life, and we spend the better part of Gummo hanging out with them. At one point, Tummler and Solomon pay to have sex with a girl who has Downs Syndrome, and later on, they break into the home of another teen named Jarrod (Daniel Martin), who lives with his comatose grandmother (Berniece M Duvall). To find out if she can still feel pain, Tummler instructs Solomon to shoot the grandmother in the foot with a BB gun. 

We meet others along the way, including a drunk played by director Harmony Korine himself, who tries to convince an African-American little person (Bryant L. Crenshaw) to kiss him. 

There are moments in Gummo when Korine is clearly aiming for something higher (in one sequence, a young girl describes, in detail, how her father went about molesting her), and others where he is content to wallow in the apathy and sadness that has taken hold of his characters' lives.

Which brings us back to the question at hand: is Gummo art, or is it trash? 

Damned if I know. 

But I will say this: it’s a movie that must be seen to be believed!