Harmony Korine, Trash Humpers, Drag City; 2010.
"The first thing that comes to my mind after watching Trash Humpers is a rather insouciant question: I wonder how many reviews of this film are going to stretch the limits of what constitutes an accurate synonym for ‘transgressive?’ Every indication given from the basic premise of the movie would naturally suggest that Harmony Korine is trying to freak out the squares again. However, I think this is dead wrong. Mr. Korine is at a point in his filmmaking career where he should understand that very little shocks most astute audiences anymore. If it turns out that he is in fact trying to pass Trash Humpers off as a trangressive piece of art, then he’s fallen prey to the one thing that you’d think would be most vile to him: obsolescence. Thankfully, I’m pretty sure this is not the case.
Trash Humpers’ narrative is at best loosely cobbled together, involving four elderly people roving around the suburbs of Nashville, committing all kinds of crimes against nature, and humping a godawful lot of trashcans. Mr. Korine, after his most technically mainstream film to date, Mister Lonely, has gotten back in touch with his dogmé roots, crafting a film that, in terms of its technical aspects, verges on the laughably amateur. The film plays out like an old found VHS tape, complete with an auto-tracking display and that annoying tendency of old tapes to pitch-shift in places after one-too-many viewings. Korine shot the entire film in character, making random, creepy cackles and leading his fellow actors in various chants from behind the camera, the effect of his looming presence heightening the verité mood of the film. What we see when watching it is a seemingly random stringing together of disparate scenes, the one unifying thread between them being the total and utter depravity of the movie’s principal subjects.
For the film, Korine, his buddies Travis Nicholson and Brian Kotzur, and his young wife, Rachel, donned thrift store outfits, orthopedic shoes, and quite realistic old-people masks and set about the business of sexually dominating the trash bins of their hometown, Nashville. Along the way, they meet a pair of conjoined twins who they force to make them pancakes, a transvestite poet, some overweight prostitutes, and several other weird folks, all of whom they abuse. But what’s the point? Any attempt towards a linear understanding of the film will definitely prove fruitless and frustrating. Korine gives us hints about what he might mean through all of the depravity, but sure enough contradicts himself moments later. After a while, it becomes clear that this is intentional on the director's part, that he is in fact steering us away from trying to interpret the vague symbolism and shades of meaning and plot that he dangles in front of us like a carrot before a confused horse. He is not trying to make a statement about the depravity of mankind or how we may or may not have lost our way as a society. He's just showing us a raw portrait of the way his demented characters interact with the world around them. If you allow him to do so, the entire experience becomes electrifying.
It seems to me that this movie’s depraved subject matter will surely pique the disdain of many of Mr. Korine’s most vehement detractors, who, for the most part, dislike him because they think his work merely serves to unsettle and disgust. Korine’s harshest critics have always thought of him as an immature shock artist, and the content of this film will most likely give them more than enough firepower to level their arguments of bad taste and degeneracy against him. I’m pretty sure a lot of people will come away from the experience of watching Trash Humpers with the feeling that Korine has lost any dignity that he might’ve still had after making Julien Donkey Boy, the director merely spinning his wheels, trying to get a rise out of his audience by showing them disgusting images of old people fellating tree branches, murdering people, and destroying private property, etc. This cursory and thick-headed reading of Korine’s latest effort would serve no justice to the indelible characters and honest portrayals of humanity that have always been a benchmark of his films, Trash Humpers being no exception.
Trash Humpers will probably pass under the radar of mainstream Western moviegoers much in the same way that Korine’s other films have. This is a real pity, seeing as he’s one of the most original and talented filmmakers our country has to offer the world. The director’s now famous maxim that he “never cared so much about making perfect sense” rings true throughout the film. Somehow this works to his advantage: by freeing himself from the worry of meaning, Korine has crafted something truly interesting and thought-provoking. There is absolutely no guile whatsoever in this film. It’s terrific." - Paul Bower
"In this paper, Deborah Orr recently recounted an argument she had after seeing Chris Morris's Four Lions. "Satire is supposed to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted," her companion raged. "Who did that comfort and who did it afflict?" Well, Harmony Korine's new film, Trash Humpers, afflicts everyone, the afflicted and the comfortable. It is a continuous, 78-minute afflict-a-thon. It sendeth acid rain on the just and the unjust. It is a downpour on those who admire good taste, and those who admire bad taste. George Clooney fans will have a fit of the vapours; old school John Waters fans will be yearning for a reprise of the Good Morning Baltimore number from Hairspray. It is an exercise in experimental provocation and in pure insolence, while sometimes being horribly funny and fascinating, reviving the spirit of Tod Browning's Freaks and the ice-cold vision of Diane Arbus.
Trash Humpers is the home movie from hell, filmed on what appears to be ropey analogue video and is viewed as if on some giant, cheap monitor or VHS machine. This video seems to have been rescued from, well, the trash. The lettering for the opening and closing credits is in the same fuzzy sans-serif style as for the instructions PLAY and REW that sometimes flicker up on screen. It features three grotesques, monsters from a horror film who have somehow got existentially excluded from the main gory action, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's play.
Before the film began, its title made me think it might actually be about garbage men, and I even wondered nervously if the director would risk a pun on "humpers". Suffice to say that the opening shot shows three ageing hillbilly weirdos getting sexual pleasure from dry-humping rubbish bins at dead of night. They giggle and snicker continually, moronically, like Beavis and Butt-head; visually, they faintly resemble Monty Python's Gumby. Their faces appear from a distance to be horror masks – but perhaps aren't. They travel around screeching, giggling, tittering, occasionally murdering people. There is an extraordinary sequence in which a very, very fat man lies down, plays the trumpet and talks trash. Who on earth is he? You've got me. But he is funny.
Harmony Korine, a once fashionable indie figure whose star fell after early success with Kids and Gummo, is once again showing some spark: a gadfly who annoys and provokes. One abandoned project of the director's is called Fight Harm, a collection of footage showing him picking fights with people in the street and getting his ass kicked, a little like the Kentucky Fried Movie sketch. I'd like to see him revive the idea, beginning with very cross people who object to Trash Humpers." - Peter Bradshaw
"In 1999 Harmony Korine began a video project called “Fight Harm,” in which he encouraged random people to beat him up. Because of his success (otherwise known as injuries), that project was abandoned, but it continues in spirit with “Trash Humpers,” a film that cries out for its maker to be bloodied, perhaps unfairly, by critics and audiences alike.
At first glance (and second and third), it appears that Mr. Korine has handed an ancient camcorder to a quartet of geriatric mental patients, then released them into a parking lot to have sex with trash cans. Yipping and yowling, these crusty degenerates (two of whom are played by the director and his wife, Rachel) embark on a nighttime prowl through suburban Tennessee, defecating on driveways and fellating foliage. Behaving like drunken teenagers, they smash television sets and fornicate with obese prostitutes, the camera clinging for dear life to a jiggling, be-thonged rear capable of crushing watermelons.
Shot and edited on VHS tape that seems to have been fermented in a Dumpster, then gnawed by angry raccoons, the characters’ gleeful exploits unspool in freaky — and punishingly repetitive — vignettes. Designed to resemble an artifact that, according to the press notes, “was found somewhere and unearthed,” the film is a brutish stunt that slowly evolves into a nightmarish fairy tale. Its decrepit delinquents, concealed behind burn-victim masks and chanting snatches of old American folk songs, abduct a baby and invade a home, forcing the resident to eat pancakes smothered in dish soap. At one point the lone female shows a little boy how to secrete a razor blade in an apple — a scene that’s somehow more repulsive than the film’s other insertions.
Drawing inspiration from underground videos and urban legends, Mr. Korine builds an increasingly troubling atmosphere of decay and deviance. Off-screen grunts accompany crawling close-ups of bloody sneakers and a corpse’s wrinkly scrotum; a knife and an ax are snickeringly deployed. Much of this is just so much juvenile posturing, but every so often the screen freezes into something approximating beauty: a blurry, spaced-out, yellow-green landscape, as alien as an ancient photograph.
Even the humor is exotic, including a monologue on the benefits of headlessness (“Models would be judged by their shoulders”) and the hilarious sight of a character being turned on by a mailbox.
Idolized in some quarters and reviled in others, Mr. Korine, now 37, may be a bit long in the tooth for the enfant terrible act. But it’s impossible to dismiss completely a filmmaker capable of producing the charmingly surreal “Mister Lonely” (2007). And if there is a point to “Trash Humpers” beyond simply mooning the audience, it’s that this visual experiment — like Johnny Rotten’s sneering rendition of “God Save the Queen” — suggests a future martyred to greed.
“Make it, make it, don’t take it!” chant his vintage vandals, ranting against “entitled elites” and peeping in windows. However crassly delivered, Mr. Korine’s warning against over-consumption is unambiguous: these savages are our future, our “true seed.” The only surprise is that he didn’t include a shot of one of them violating this film." - Jeannette Catsoulis
"If ever there were a movie that cried out to be either accepted on its own terms or fucking hated, that film is Trash Humpers. This should come as no surprise as it is a film by Harmony Korine, a filmmaker whose very name incites temper tantrums or seething faux-indifference from cinephiles of all stripes. Each of Korine's films is (calculatedly or inadvertently) a provocation, and nearly all of them succeed in this regard. His never-to-be-finished auto-portrait Fight Harm, in which the director literally goads people into beating him up, would perhaps be the least subtle example of this career-long goal. But following in a close second place is Trash Humpers, which, in its very title, begs for immediate dismissal.
So, if you're not interested, or if you, like many, insist on taking some kind of personal offense to Korine's films, spare yourself the anguish. For those who imagined the comparatively normal, humanistic, even kinda pretty Mister Lonely was some indication of a career 180 for the director, I'm sorry to disappoint you. Trash Humpers finds Korine back in the grim and grimy universe of Gummo, a place of grotesquerie, bestiality, apathy, decay—and snickering, unrepentant jollity.
For the latecomers and those who haven't yet run screaming, a synopsis: A gang of elderly degenerates wanders aimlessly through suburban neighborhoods, wreaks havoc, and films their exploits on a decrepit VHS camcorder. All we see for the film's 80 minutes are the images captured on this device: The trash humpers squatting to crap on driveways and doorsteps; the trash humpers smashing televisions, cinder blocks, and boom boxes in a desolate parking lot; the trash humpers hosing down their wheelchair in a carwash at night; the trash humpers jumping on a trampoline in the middle of the street; the trash humpers partying with some fat prostitutes; the trash humpers ogling a garbage can, while offscreen other trash humpers grunt lustily, cackle maniacally, and chant, sing, or simply yelp, “Git it!”
If all of this sounds completely idiotic, it is. But Korine's perverse commitment to this idiocy holds the film together, allowing you to lose yourself (if you're so inclined) in its grisly and analog-fuzzy view of the world. Veering from the sublime to the repugnant, Korine maintains the form of a "pseudo-artifact" to the letter, plotlessly persisting with random interjections, long, pointless passages, maddening repetitions, and overall sloppiness. The film maintains a form of curious, mind-bending verisimilitude, and this is in no small way thanks to the masks worn by the cast (which includes Korine himself). The mask of the female humper (played by Korine's wife, Rachel) is perhaps a little too ghoulish, but those of her male counterparts more deftly, abstractly toe the line of the believable. With their clenched mouths, gnashing dentures, veiny necks, shrunken eyes, and odd age-discoloration, they're expressive enough that they consistently mess with your suspension of disbelief. Your brain tries desperately to make sense of these figures as something human, plausible, reasonable. Naturally, your brain fails, and this inability to reconcile what you're watching with any fully comprehensible provenance is what makes the film fascinating, even as it tests your patience or your gag reflex.
What Korine seems to be attempting here is a project similar to those of his sometime musical collaborators, the Sun City Girls (who provided half the soundtrack to Mister Lonely), who in their "Carnival Folklore Resurrection" series from the early 00s tried to recreate, imitate, and even mock various forms of world music and pass the results off as artifactual. (They’ve also long been fond of obscure cassette-tape releases well into the CD and MP3 ages.) However dim-witted this seems, neither the film nor the Sun City Girls' projects is as easy to pull off as it might sound, either technically or in terms of believability. In other words, contriving sloppiness and chaos and making it credible is no mean feat, with or without the use of abject, bargain-basement technology. Nonetheless, Korine very nearly manages to author his very own suburban legend of wild, geriatric savages who perform their bizarre, ritualistic evil seemingly for the pleasure of it, like bored, stoned teenagers: giggling, breaking shit, playing basketball, setting off bottle-rockets, inflicting violence on objects and people for no reason.
Of course, while all this sounds like gleeful stupid fun, there are also many nods to some of the more folkloric evils of the American hinterlands: peeping toms, dirty old men, wicked old ladies secreting razor blades inside apples, and, of course, racist hillbillies. A mounting undercurrent of terror drives this seemingly unstructured film forward with increasingly upsetting imagery, as the camera happens upon a row of blood-spattered white Velcro sneakers, or a naked corpse lying in the weeds. Through the miasma of VHS, Korine fashions an unsettling atmosphere out of the sound of porch- and street-lights buzzing, the sight of syrupy brown sunsets over highways and parking lots, and hot orange crisscross flares on the lens. The sight of Korine's own character wearing a confederate flag t-shirt while grinding his crotch against a tree is a particularly unsubtle piece of audience baiting, but there are weirder, more subterranean gestures, too. The soundtrack is largely devoid of music except for two songs that the humpers repeat (and repeat and repeat), both drawn from Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music: “Single Girl, Married Girl” (as popularized by the Carter Family) and a butchered version of “The Devil and the Farmer's Wife.” References like these, buried in the muck of bland contemporary Americana, suggest a sort of collective, subconscious evil that is uniquely rooted in the hollers and crevices of Appalachia. This is, in many ways, the film that Rob Zombie has been almost-making for years.
There are similarities here not only to weird, underground video ephemera but also to skateboarding videos of the Nineties (where Jackass gleaned most of its talent), and these suggest that the film's primary influences lie completely outside the realms of tasteful, beard-stroking cinema that dare not speak Korine's name. But the ultimate paradox of Trash Humpers is that it is a real movie—transferred to celluloid and everything. Sure, fetishists of dead technologies will relish the coy VCR-dubbing discursions, the lovely crisscross tracking issues, and visible "REW" and "PLAY" displays in the upper left-hand corner, but Trash Humpers is a film designed not for the personal use of a fictional video underground (like a snuff film, also something of an urban legend) but for the communal experience of a movie theater. In the cinema the experience is downright magical, what with the haze of video washing across the celluloid and people walking out after ten minutes and audibly cursing the film. (Somehow, the idea of watching Trash Humpers in your home theater is too depressing a notion to contemplate.) In fact, provocateur though he is, Korine is neither thumbing his nose at cinephilia, nor daringly embracing video, but rather paying curious tribute to both by resuscitating a format that’s even deader than film itself." - Leo Goldsmith
"You can take Harmony Korine’s latest film to task for plenty of transgressions: mistaking willful incoherence for free-form profundity; the worshipful wallowing in Vice Magazine scuzziness in the name of avant-street cred; trying to pass off vintage, butt-ugly analog visuals as some sort of viral found-footage anarchy. (Throw a coin in a room full of critics—we kindly ask that you aim for their heads—and you’ll hit one that praises the movie for these exact same qualities.) But what you can’t accuse this Dadaist America’s Funniest Home Videos of doing is peddling false advertising; you will indeed see trash being humped, repeatedly, by Korine, his wife and several buddies in grotesque geriatric masks. Plus, there’s wanton destruction of TV sets—viva vandalism!—spastic tap dancing, and real-life American Gothic eccentrics spewing racist bile. Awesome.
Korine’s strength has always been finding odd moments of poetry in backwoods perversity (see Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy), a talent that’s AWOL from this extended YouTube experiment until the surprisingly tender final shot. But by that point, viewers have been subjected to one long, screeching exercise whose point is its sheer pointlessness. Once, we got a mustache on the Mona Lisa and a urinal in a gallery; now we get Trash Humpers. If this is what passes for contemporary art terrorism, we’ll opt instead for something truly subversive—like genuine art.—David Fear
"A mind-numbing piece of would-be provocation from the button-pushing Harmony Korine, "Trash Humpers" gets no stars from me -- not because it's offensive and disgusting like his earlier "Gummo" and "Julien Donkey-Boy," but because it's about as enervating a way to waste 78 minutes as I've ever experienced.
Deliberately shot on eyeball-gougingly ugly, badly lit analog video in Nashville, this plotless mess features Korine and his pals in geriatric masks, sometimes in wheelchairs, acting out.
They repeatedly try to raise audience hackles by committing "outrageous" acts like dragging dolls behind bicycles and, well, rubbing up against pretty much any surface available, including trash containers.
All the while they sing twisted nursery rhymes like: "Three little devils who jumped over the wall, chopped off their heads and murdered them all."
"Trash Humpers," which somehow made it into last year's New York Film Festival, demonstrates that a supposedly "subversive" no-budget film can be every bit as boring and predictable as a megabucks Hollywood blockbuster." - Lou Lumenick
"The first thing that comes to my mind after watching Trash Humpers is a rather insouciant question: I wonder how many reviews of this film are going to stretch the limits of what constitutes an accurate synonym for ‘transgressive?’ Every indication given from the basic premise of the movie would naturally suggest that Harmony Korine is trying to freak out the squares again. However, I think this is dead wrong. Mr. Korine is at a point in his filmmaking career where he should understand that very little shocks most astute audiences anymore. If it turns out that he is in fact trying to pass Trash Humpers off as a trangressive piece of art, then he’s fallen prey to the one thing that you’d think would be most vile to him: obsolescence. Thankfully, I’m pretty sure this is not the case.
Trash Humpers’ narrative is at best loosely cobbled together, involving four elderly people roving around the suburbs of Nashville, committing all kinds of crimes against nature, and humping a godawful lot of trashcans. Mr. Korine, after his most technically mainstream film to date, Mister Lonely, has gotten back in touch with his dogmé roots, crafting a film that, in terms of its technical aspects, verges on the laughably amateur. The film plays out like an old found VHS tape, complete with an auto-tracking display and that annoying tendency of old tapes to pitch-shift in places after one-too-many viewings. Korine shot the entire film in character, making random, creepy cackles and leading his fellow actors in various chants from behind the camera, the effect of his looming presence heightening the verité mood of the film. What we see when watching it is a seemingly random stringing together of disparate scenes, the one unifying thread between them being the total and utter depravity of the movie’s principal subjects.
For the film, Korine, his buddies Travis Nicholson and Brian Kotzur, and his young wife, Rachel, donned thrift store outfits, orthopedic shoes, and quite realistic old-people masks and set about the business of sexually dominating the trash bins of their hometown, Nashville. Along the way, they meet a pair of conjoined twins who they force to make them pancakes, a transvestite poet, some overweight prostitutes, and several other weird folks, all of whom they abuse. But what’s the point? Any attempt towards a linear understanding of the film will definitely prove fruitless and frustrating. Korine gives us hints about what he might mean through all of the depravity, but sure enough contradicts himself moments later. After a while, it becomes clear that this is intentional on the director's part, that he is in fact steering us away from trying to interpret the vague symbolism and shades of meaning and plot that he dangles in front of us like a carrot before a confused horse. He is not trying to make a statement about the depravity of mankind or how we may or may not have lost our way as a society. He's just showing us a raw portrait of the way his demented characters interact with the world around them. If you allow him to do so, the entire experience becomes electrifying.
It seems to me that this movie’s depraved subject matter will surely pique the disdain of many of Mr. Korine’s most vehement detractors, who, for the most part, dislike him because they think his work merely serves to unsettle and disgust. Korine’s harshest critics have always thought of him as an immature shock artist, and the content of this film will most likely give them more than enough firepower to level their arguments of bad taste and degeneracy against him. I’m pretty sure a lot of people will come away from the experience of watching Trash Humpers with the feeling that Korine has lost any dignity that he might’ve still had after making Julien Donkey Boy, the director merely spinning his wheels, trying to get a rise out of his audience by showing them disgusting images of old people fellating tree branches, murdering people, and destroying private property, etc. This cursory and thick-headed reading of Korine’s latest effort would serve no justice to the indelible characters and honest portrayals of humanity that have always been a benchmark of his films, Trash Humpers being no exception.
Trash Humpers will probably pass under the radar of mainstream Western moviegoers much in the same way that Korine’s other films have. This is a real pity, seeing as he’s one of the most original and talented filmmakers our country has to offer the world. The director’s now famous maxim that he “never cared so much about making perfect sense” rings true throughout the film. Somehow this works to his advantage: by freeing himself from the worry of meaning, Korine has crafted something truly interesting and thought-provoking. There is absolutely no guile whatsoever in this film. It’s terrific." - Paul Bower
"In this paper, Deborah Orr recently recounted an argument she had after seeing Chris Morris's Four Lions. "Satire is supposed to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted," her companion raged. "Who did that comfort and who did it afflict?" Well, Harmony Korine's new film, Trash Humpers, afflicts everyone, the afflicted and the comfortable. It is a continuous, 78-minute afflict-a-thon. It sendeth acid rain on the just and the unjust. It is a downpour on those who admire good taste, and those who admire bad taste. George Clooney fans will have a fit of the vapours; old school John Waters fans will be yearning for a reprise of the Good Morning Baltimore number from Hairspray. It is an exercise in experimental provocation and in pure insolence, while sometimes being horribly funny and fascinating, reviving the spirit of Tod Browning's Freaks and the ice-cold vision of Diane Arbus.
Trash Humpers is the home movie from hell, filmed on what appears to be ropey analogue video and is viewed as if on some giant, cheap monitor or VHS machine. This video seems to have been rescued from, well, the trash. The lettering for the opening and closing credits is in the same fuzzy sans-serif style as for the instructions PLAY and REW that sometimes flicker up on screen. It features three grotesques, monsters from a horror film who have somehow got existentially excluded from the main gory action, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's play.
Before the film began, its title made me think it might actually be about garbage men, and I even wondered nervously if the director would risk a pun on "humpers". Suffice to say that the opening shot shows three ageing hillbilly weirdos getting sexual pleasure from dry-humping rubbish bins at dead of night. They giggle and snicker continually, moronically, like Beavis and Butt-head; visually, they faintly resemble Monty Python's Gumby. Their faces appear from a distance to be horror masks – but perhaps aren't. They travel around screeching, giggling, tittering, occasionally murdering people. There is an extraordinary sequence in which a very, very fat man lies down, plays the trumpet and talks trash. Who on earth is he? You've got me. But he is funny.
Harmony Korine, a once fashionable indie figure whose star fell after early success with Kids and Gummo, is once again showing some spark: a gadfly who annoys and provokes. One abandoned project of the director's is called Fight Harm, a collection of footage showing him picking fights with people in the street and getting his ass kicked, a little like the Kentucky Fried Movie sketch. I'd like to see him revive the idea, beginning with very cross people who object to Trash Humpers." - Peter Bradshaw
"In 1999 Harmony Korine began a video project called “Fight Harm,” in which he encouraged random people to beat him up. Because of his success (otherwise known as injuries), that project was abandoned, but it continues in spirit with “Trash Humpers,” a film that cries out for its maker to be bloodied, perhaps unfairly, by critics and audiences alike.
At first glance (and second and third), it appears that Mr. Korine has handed an ancient camcorder to a quartet of geriatric mental patients, then released them into a parking lot to have sex with trash cans. Yipping and yowling, these crusty degenerates (two of whom are played by the director and his wife, Rachel) embark on a nighttime prowl through suburban Tennessee, defecating on driveways and fellating foliage. Behaving like drunken teenagers, they smash television sets and fornicate with obese prostitutes, the camera clinging for dear life to a jiggling, be-thonged rear capable of crushing watermelons.
Shot and edited on VHS tape that seems to have been fermented in a Dumpster, then gnawed by angry raccoons, the characters’ gleeful exploits unspool in freaky — and punishingly repetitive — vignettes. Designed to resemble an artifact that, according to the press notes, “was found somewhere and unearthed,” the film is a brutish stunt that slowly evolves into a nightmarish fairy tale. Its decrepit delinquents, concealed behind burn-victim masks and chanting snatches of old American folk songs, abduct a baby and invade a home, forcing the resident to eat pancakes smothered in dish soap. At one point the lone female shows a little boy how to secrete a razor blade in an apple — a scene that’s somehow more repulsive than the film’s other insertions.
Drawing inspiration from underground videos and urban legends, Mr. Korine builds an increasingly troubling atmosphere of decay and deviance. Off-screen grunts accompany crawling close-ups of bloody sneakers and a corpse’s wrinkly scrotum; a knife and an ax are snickeringly deployed. Much of this is just so much juvenile posturing, but every so often the screen freezes into something approximating beauty: a blurry, spaced-out, yellow-green landscape, as alien as an ancient photograph.
Even the humor is exotic, including a monologue on the benefits of headlessness (“Models would be judged by their shoulders”) and the hilarious sight of a character being turned on by a mailbox.
Idolized in some quarters and reviled in others, Mr. Korine, now 37, may be a bit long in the tooth for the enfant terrible act. But it’s impossible to dismiss completely a filmmaker capable of producing the charmingly surreal “Mister Lonely” (2007). And if there is a point to “Trash Humpers” beyond simply mooning the audience, it’s that this visual experiment — like Johnny Rotten’s sneering rendition of “God Save the Queen” — suggests a future martyred to greed.
“Make it, make it, don’t take it!” chant his vintage vandals, ranting against “entitled elites” and peeping in windows. However crassly delivered, Mr. Korine’s warning against over-consumption is unambiguous: these savages are our future, our “true seed.” The only surprise is that he didn’t include a shot of one of them violating this film." - Jeannette Catsoulis
"If ever there were a movie that cried out to be either accepted on its own terms or fucking hated, that film is Trash Humpers. This should come as no surprise as it is a film by Harmony Korine, a filmmaker whose very name incites temper tantrums or seething faux-indifference from cinephiles of all stripes. Each of Korine's films is (calculatedly or inadvertently) a provocation, and nearly all of them succeed in this regard. His never-to-be-finished auto-portrait Fight Harm, in which the director literally goads people into beating him up, would perhaps be the least subtle example of this career-long goal. But following in a close second place is Trash Humpers, which, in its very title, begs for immediate dismissal.
So, if you're not interested, or if you, like many, insist on taking some kind of personal offense to Korine's films, spare yourself the anguish. For those who imagined the comparatively normal, humanistic, even kinda pretty Mister Lonely was some indication of a career 180 for the director, I'm sorry to disappoint you. Trash Humpers finds Korine back in the grim and grimy universe of Gummo, a place of grotesquerie, bestiality, apathy, decay—and snickering, unrepentant jollity.
For the latecomers and those who haven't yet run screaming, a synopsis: A gang of elderly degenerates wanders aimlessly through suburban neighborhoods, wreaks havoc, and films their exploits on a decrepit VHS camcorder. All we see for the film's 80 minutes are the images captured on this device: The trash humpers squatting to crap on driveways and doorsteps; the trash humpers smashing televisions, cinder blocks, and boom boxes in a desolate parking lot; the trash humpers hosing down their wheelchair in a carwash at night; the trash humpers jumping on a trampoline in the middle of the street; the trash humpers partying with some fat prostitutes; the trash humpers ogling a garbage can, while offscreen other trash humpers grunt lustily, cackle maniacally, and chant, sing, or simply yelp, “Git it!”
If all of this sounds completely idiotic, it is. But Korine's perverse commitment to this idiocy holds the film together, allowing you to lose yourself (if you're so inclined) in its grisly and analog-fuzzy view of the world. Veering from the sublime to the repugnant, Korine maintains the form of a "pseudo-artifact" to the letter, plotlessly persisting with random interjections, long, pointless passages, maddening repetitions, and overall sloppiness. The film maintains a form of curious, mind-bending verisimilitude, and this is in no small way thanks to the masks worn by the cast (which includes Korine himself). The mask of the female humper (played by Korine's wife, Rachel) is perhaps a little too ghoulish, but those of her male counterparts more deftly, abstractly toe the line of the believable. With their clenched mouths, gnashing dentures, veiny necks, shrunken eyes, and odd age-discoloration, they're expressive enough that they consistently mess with your suspension of disbelief. Your brain tries desperately to make sense of these figures as something human, plausible, reasonable. Naturally, your brain fails, and this inability to reconcile what you're watching with any fully comprehensible provenance is what makes the film fascinating, even as it tests your patience or your gag reflex.
What Korine seems to be attempting here is a project similar to those of his sometime musical collaborators, the Sun City Girls (who provided half the soundtrack to Mister Lonely), who in their "Carnival Folklore Resurrection" series from the early 00s tried to recreate, imitate, and even mock various forms of world music and pass the results off as artifactual. (They’ve also long been fond of obscure cassette-tape releases well into the CD and MP3 ages.) However dim-witted this seems, neither the film nor the Sun City Girls' projects is as easy to pull off as it might sound, either technically or in terms of believability. In other words, contriving sloppiness and chaos and making it credible is no mean feat, with or without the use of abject, bargain-basement technology. Nonetheless, Korine very nearly manages to author his very own suburban legend of wild, geriatric savages who perform their bizarre, ritualistic evil seemingly for the pleasure of it, like bored, stoned teenagers: giggling, breaking shit, playing basketball, setting off bottle-rockets, inflicting violence on objects and people for no reason.
Of course, while all this sounds like gleeful stupid fun, there are also many nods to some of the more folkloric evils of the American hinterlands: peeping toms, dirty old men, wicked old ladies secreting razor blades inside apples, and, of course, racist hillbillies. A mounting undercurrent of terror drives this seemingly unstructured film forward with increasingly upsetting imagery, as the camera happens upon a row of blood-spattered white Velcro sneakers, or a naked corpse lying in the weeds. Through the miasma of VHS, Korine fashions an unsettling atmosphere out of the sound of porch- and street-lights buzzing, the sight of syrupy brown sunsets over highways and parking lots, and hot orange crisscross flares on the lens. The sight of Korine's own character wearing a confederate flag t-shirt while grinding his crotch against a tree is a particularly unsubtle piece of audience baiting, but there are weirder, more subterranean gestures, too. The soundtrack is largely devoid of music except for two songs that the humpers repeat (and repeat and repeat), both drawn from Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music: “Single Girl, Married Girl” (as popularized by the Carter Family) and a butchered version of “The Devil and the Farmer's Wife.” References like these, buried in the muck of bland contemporary Americana, suggest a sort of collective, subconscious evil that is uniquely rooted in the hollers and crevices of Appalachia. This is, in many ways, the film that Rob Zombie has been almost-making for years.
There are similarities here not only to weird, underground video ephemera but also to skateboarding videos of the Nineties (where Jackass gleaned most of its talent), and these suggest that the film's primary influences lie completely outside the realms of tasteful, beard-stroking cinema that dare not speak Korine's name. But the ultimate paradox of Trash Humpers is that it is a real movie—transferred to celluloid and everything. Sure, fetishists of dead technologies will relish the coy VCR-dubbing discursions, the lovely crisscross tracking issues, and visible "REW" and "PLAY" displays in the upper left-hand corner, but Trash Humpers is a film designed not for the personal use of a fictional video underground (like a snuff film, also something of an urban legend) but for the communal experience of a movie theater. In the cinema the experience is downright magical, what with the haze of video washing across the celluloid and people walking out after ten minutes and audibly cursing the film. (Somehow, the idea of watching Trash Humpers in your home theater is too depressing a notion to contemplate.) In fact, provocateur though he is, Korine is neither thumbing his nose at cinephilia, nor daringly embracing video, but rather paying curious tribute to both by resuscitating a format that’s even deader than film itself." - Leo Goldsmith
"You can take Harmony Korine’s latest film to task for plenty of transgressions: mistaking willful incoherence for free-form profundity; the worshipful wallowing in Vice Magazine scuzziness in the name of avant-street cred; trying to pass off vintage, butt-ugly analog visuals as some sort of viral found-footage anarchy. (Throw a coin in a room full of critics—we kindly ask that you aim for their heads—and you’ll hit one that praises the movie for these exact same qualities.) But what you can’t accuse this Dadaist America’s Funniest Home Videos of doing is peddling false advertising; you will indeed see trash being humped, repeatedly, by Korine, his wife and several buddies in grotesque geriatric masks. Plus, there’s wanton destruction of TV sets—viva vandalism!—spastic tap dancing, and real-life American Gothic eccentrics spewing racist bile. Awesome.
Korine’s strength has always been finding odd moments of poetry in backwoods perversity (see Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy), a talent that’s AWOL from this extended YouTube experiment until the surprisingly tender final shot. But by that point, viewers have been subjected to one long, screeching exercise whose point is its sheer pointlessness. Once, we got a mustache on the Mona Lisa and a urinal in a gallery; now we get Trash Humpers. If this is what passes for contemporary art terrorism, we’ll opt instead for something truly subversive—like genuine art.—David Fear
"A mind-numbing piece of would-be provocation from the button-pushing Harmony Korine, "Trash Humpers" gets no stars from me -- not because it's offensive and disgusting like his earlier "Gummo" and "Julien Donkey-Boy," but because it's about as enervating a way to waste 78 minutes as I've ever experienced.
Deliberately shot on eyeball-gougingly ugly, badly lit analog video in Nashville, this plotless mess features Korine and his pals in geriatric masks, sometimes in wheelchairs, acting out.
They repeatedly try to raise audience hackles by committing "outrageous" acts like dragging dolls behind bicycles and, well, rubbing up against pretty much any surface available, including trash containers.
All the while they sing twisted nursery rhymes like: "Three little devils who jumped over the wall, chopped off their heads and murdered them all."
"Trash Humpers," which somehow made it into last year's New York Film Festival, demonstrates that a supposedly "subversive" no-budget film can be every bit as boring and predictable as a megabucks Hollywood blockbuster." - Lou Lumenick
