MUBI

Trash Humpers is a fine example of how form and content should be inseparable in a work of art. I felt nauseous after watching the film not just because of the explicit nihilism of the scenes portrayed, but also because of the shaky cinematography and the grainy and constantly out-of-focus imagery.

I can understand why people perceive this film as “superficial” or “pseudoprovocative”, but for me it was like a glorious adaptation of the prose of Daniil Kharms, where the chaotic nature of the whole universe is revealed by individual action.

Harmony Korine was the man behind the script for one of the most controversial films of the 90’s, “Kids”, and one of the strangest of the 90’s “Gummo”. He’s a talk show personality to behold; his Letterman interviews are hilarious and he himself is a very funny man. Now, my relationship with his films; I thought “Kids” was pretty brilliant, a bleak film about teenage sexuality, pulling no punches whatsoever. I thought “Gummo” was interesting, but some scenes interrupted the flow of the film and seemed to be trying too hard. “Julien donkey-boy”, his Dogme 95 film, from what I’ve seen is insane and brilliant, Werner Herzog drinks cough medicine from a slipper. I have yet to see “Mister Lonely” but it looks slightly interesting. Now, “Trash Humpers”. I have been anticipating this film for a long, long time. It looked like a creepy, nightmarish film with a clear sense of humour. Ever since I saw the longer trailer I’ve wanted to see it, and I finally got to.

This film was infuriating and annoying to say the least. I wanted to love it before seeing it, but at a certain point I gave up hope. The film, shot on VHS in the age old “found-footage” style (it plays like a film found in the bin behind a shopping centre), follows four elderly people (actually younger people in masks) who roam streets, car parks, garages, houses etc. vandalising and violating everything in their path, and committing some ever more serious crimes along the way. If you haven’t heard of this film before now, looking at the title, I know what you want to ask… yes… they hump bins. I don’t know why, but it’s funny. It’s one of the few things in the film which worked.

Now, onto the reasons it was infuriating and annoying… for the most part, the film is silly, juvenile and… just plain bad (the monologue about what life would be like without a head was notably pathetic, as was the boy in the suit demonstrating how to murder a doll), but every now and again, Korine will insert a scene or image or event which has a genuine sense of brilliant transcendence, creepiness or, sometimes, comedy. For one, the final few moments, where the female “humper” enters a home and takes a baby in the middle of the night, walking it down the middle of the road singing a creepy lullaby. That scene had an authentic nightmarish quality to it, and will stick in my head for quite some time. A film like this, a series of vignettes, can be judged separately, but as a whole, it’s pretty stupid.

I think it was Korine’s objective to divide his audience. Making a film like this, he has to expect a huge divide. He has stated that any reaction to the film is the right one, and that he can see why some people have been so verbal about their hate for the film.

This was pretty cool. I thought it had a very perverse sort of beauty to it, which I know sounds wrong. I thought it was actually pretty disgusting and I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to finish it when I started watching it. Thankfully it’s actually only around 78 minutes long, so the film certainly didn’t wear out it’s welcome. There’s a lot of chaos and mayhem, and it reminded me A LOT of Even Dwarfs Started Small. I have always disliked that film, and I actually found this film’s imagery to be preferable to the imagery in that film. I don’t know what that says about me, however. I wanted to turn this off soon after it started because it created such an unpredictable atmosphere and I was afraid that the film would show me more things that I didn’t want to see that would bother me and get stuck in my head. There is plenty of horrific imagery here if you’re into that kind of thing. The ending is completely terrible and depressing and yet sort of sweet in a way. I don’t know what to think of this film, it’s pretty tasteless stuff. It’s a really really bad film, and I laughed at some of it because of how shitty it was. The thing is, it’s also really genuinely funny too. Some of the yelping and screaming that these people made truly cracked me up. There’s an already somewhat famous scene in which a character talks about how life would be so much better if we were born without heads, and while some of the things the character says are funny as hell, there are also a lot of really truthful and thoughtful things the character also says that comes off almost completely charming. I actually did find this to be rather involving in that it reminded me of the sorts of things I used to do when I was younger and in elementary school. I have fond memories of walking through the woods and going to an abandoned railroad near a dilapidated house and just smashing stuff and vandalizing the entire area. I smashed empty beer bottles that homeless people left behind, I broke windows, I tossed cinder blocks at walls and watched them break apart, I set things on fire only to stomp it out shortly after, etc. Mind you, I didn’t do these sorts of things very often but doing it was fun. The unsettling imagery in this film ranges from filmed cold-blooded murder to more subtle distressing imagery such as two shoes located on a porch that are both meant for the same foot. I don’t want to talk too much more about this film, but I will say that this spoke to me more than Even Dwarfs Started Small, and I think that Korine was onto something about the truthfulness in horror imagery and how the human mind conjurers more mentally distressful aspects of the imagery to create a story that they can put themselves in. I think that, when looking at the images in this film that way it comes off more effective. I doubt that it was Korine’s intention, but that’s what I got out of it. A lot of people seem to find Harmony Korine’s films pretty disturbing, and to be honest this is the only one I’ve seen that I’ve found truly troubling in anyway. I found Gummo to be absolutely breathtaking and I found it’s imagery to be full of truth about growing up in a dead-end town. Julien Donkey-boy was a little more on the perverse side of things, but it was so touching and I appreciated the fact that it dealt with both the beauty of mental impairment as well as the tragedies. Mister Lonely had such a magical sense of euphoria about it that I found extremely enjoyable and as sweet-natured as anything I’ve seen, yet I appreciated that it wasn’t afraid to get really dark when it needed to. Trash Humpers is certainly the ugliest and most mean-spirited of Korine’s films, and it’s definitely my least favorite of his, but I really like that Harmony Korine puts himself out there and makes the kinds of films that he wants to make and see, just because there isn’t anything like it. I cannot digest the imagery in Trash Humpers as well as I was hoping I would, but I definitely feel that he brought out a real sense of horror through the shot-on-video quality. Films that are shot-on-video have always creeped me out due to the general cheapness of it, and I liked that Korine uses the cheap video quality to it’s full potential here. It’s a bad, bad film, but that’s the point I suppose. It doesn’t really matter if you like it or not, because it only exists so that it can exist and so that certain images can exist. In that sense, it is art.

If you counter-pointed a few metaphor here, you could find three i Pads (as an example of ultra modern literacy, main-stream technology, prestige, etc) in the world of useless TV sets, desktop computers, receivers, radios, and even grandma’s antique music box are full of dog’s shit, so, instead of Wiener Waltz you’ll hear … eek… eeek… eeeek… Well, some new toys changes some old toys, but only one toy survive and humping around! Hehehe… Korine is brilliant!

The movie’s called “Trash Humpers”, its directed by Harmony Korine, so you can only imagine the possibilities. The film walks the line between fiction & documentary, in the same vein as Orson Welles’ “F for Fake” or Werner Herzog’s “The Wild Blue Yonder”. I guess you could label the movie as a mockumentary. At the Q&A for Trash Humpers, Korine called this movie a “found object”, in the sense that he tried to make it seem like an artifact, or a lost videotape dug up or discovered after 20 years. The barely plot less story follows the day-to-day adventures of a group of (whom i assume to be) mentally disturbed friends who dress and act like old people. Through the course of the movie, they hump trashcans (hence the title of the movie), order obese hookers, murder of a few people, steal a baby, teach a little kid to put razor blades in fruit and eat pancakes with dish detergent instead of syrup. …yeah. Imagine the last 10 minutes of “the blair witch project”, mixed with ALL the disturbing shit from Korine’s earlier film; “Gummo”, in the form of a feature length film. The movie was shot on old home camcorders, to make it appear as if what we’re watching is real. Although the “plot” of the movie is somewhat different, the whole idea of what Korine was trying to do isn’t all that different from what blair witch did a decade ago. Bottom line, if you’re a Harmony Korine fan and you’re familiar with what he’s capable of, you’ll probably go see it. If you aren’t that familiar with Korine’s work (like the 2 women who sat next to me at the screening), i would NOT recommend this. I mean, before the start of the film, Korine himself said; “If you’re prone to walking out of movies, you might as well walk out now.” And plenty of people did in fact walk out before the end of the movie.