Trash Humpers

source: Trash Humpers

People either respect it or disrespect it...you watch a movie like "Trash Humpers" and either you get it...or you don't. Not saying I do "get it"...it's like "getting" a surreal dream from some psychotic, redneck stranger you've never met. Is it art? Yes. There are more then a few moments when director Harmony Korine finds simple yet profound beauty where we would not expect, and with a VHS camera no less...reminiscent of "American Beauty"'s young camcorder holder. There is also, for me, a message in the madness. Is Korine slyly telling us what monsters the previous generations have been...how they "hump" up everything they touch...how they worship, even sexualized materialism? If so then I get that. It's too subliminal and abstract to be preachy and it's to shockingly grotesque to be analyzed by the mainstream for that message. There is a very talented and intelligent film maker below this "trash". There is value to this film. I dare to submit it in the realm of genius.

Um, what can I say. This "film" made me dumber. I feel like an idiot for watching this "film". Can you really call this a "film". Just because you put some crap on VHS, does not make it a film! What total garbage! Enter pun here. WTF. You must be totally retarded to love this "film". Who the F#@$ voted high for this film. I didn't laugh once. Can't believe I watched the whole thing! These people have waaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy to much time on there hands. Go get a real job! You suck as filmmakers, if one considered this a "film". Man, I don't think I would watch another film from these retards ever! I kept watching hoping that something cool would happen. Boy do I feel stupid. Only an idiot would like this crap! Who voted for this thing? What in the world were these idiots thinking? No wonder the director is a total flop. I would watch the other movies, but I am now too stupid to do so. WTF. Jackass ripoff. Totally lame. WTF. WTF. What total crap. Are they trying to be funny? Ironic? WTF. I am now dumber. Thanks retards. WTF. I can feel my brain shrinking. If it is any consolation, my cat watched for 30 seconds, and got bored. He's 2 months old. WTF.

Trash Humpers is a cathartic and beautiful film which portrays its heavily anti-establishment main characters not as an affront to the mainstream but as some kind of mutated, retard afterbirth of society that exists on a completely different path from the mainstream. The entire premise of Trash Humpers seems to pose the question 'what if instead of suppressing our human instincts to maintain society and the greater good, we all just acted on our most basic needs and feelings from moment to moment?' These characters are absolutely and completely unfettered by other people and simply do whatever they want all the time, which makes them a kind of romantic, devilish spectacle to watch. The film's extremely low grade VHS footage is hypnotizing when blown up on a pristine 35mm film print. If anything, I'm glad that Trash Humpers will preserve evidence of the now almost extinct VHS era. You simply will not see anything quite like this anywhere else and seeing it in beautiful 35mm is a totally unique experience not soon forgotten.

Here's a film where a bunch of old people literally hump trash and lampposts, * plants, throw firecrackers as they recite verse, tapdance in a parking lot and smash TVs. There is no story. There is no cinematic beauty to speak of, it's shot on ugly VHS and the artifact shows. It is, at first and possibly second and third glance, a pointless film designed to grate. But what do we learn about ourselves if we shy away from the confrontation? Watching this, a self that criticizes comes to the fore for whom all of this has no point, he might not be altogether wrong, but let's surprise ourselves, pipe that self down and, not giving him final say in our view, see what else may pop up. Let's engage our own limits of sense. What grates here seems to be this: old people do unnatural things, babies are dragged behind bicycles, elsewhere a kid hammers a baby's head or a man dressed as a french maid lies murdered in a pool of blood in a kitchen floor with a hammer next to him. Korine himself partly labors under the concept of a media satire, giving us bare sketches without the framework of story or visually dressed of the same violent inanity we consume elsewhere, not much interesting in itself. The beauty comes once you start to see through that uptight self that can only settle for these things as part of a story. The men only wear masks of old people, the baby is a doll, we plainly know that the man in the french maid costume is playing dead and that is maple syrup on the floor. Unlike other films where the illusion sweeps us into belief, here we know it is all make believe, know this as we watch. So why be struck by a sense of desolation? It seems only because we are anxiously prepared to engage a world where the objects (a man lying murdered) are enlivened by their significance, supplying that horizon is what we're made to do. But here plainly they don't, there is no murder, no baby being savaged and only the form, the context of their significance. A man lies naked in the mud, the image carries a sense of something wrong. The assumption is why would he do that if something wasn't wrong? But how uptight is that? He's just a dude told to lie there. Having peeled through this, what's left? 'Make it, don't fake it'. A dude lying there, faking it and yet not. The vivid reality of this being a play. The playing itself. Not just an ode to destruction, there's no value to that, but the joy of tapdancing in a parking lot. No mistake, it's one of the great films on the illusion of story and the real life beyond that, but you'll have to be still until that nagging old self exhausts his critique and you become the wandering eye finding unexpected happenings among unremarkable America. It pays off with more evident value in Spring Breakers. There the partying figures pushing against the limits of sense become desirable young girls, the landscape is similarly inversed from drab middle America to alluring Florida, the humping becomes twerking, but the journey is the same marvelous one: finding in the standard perception of something being empty of value, a deeper one which is the capacity for immersion. There are plenty of films about a staid beauty, like Baraka. This is for those who want to get dirty living it through.

This useless excuse of a film further proves that stupid people will watch anything. It also proves that not only are film critics abnormally stupid, but they are also insane. How anyone could call this "art" is beyond my comprehension. How anyone could review this "film" and not give it negative 10 stars is unbelievable. My five year old niece shoots better quality video than this with a $10 digital camera, and anyone who thinks the crappy video was deliberate probably also believes that OJ Simpson is not guilty, that Santa Claus is real, and the Tooth Fairy flies around at night collecting teeth. This film is pure garbage, probably shot by a drunk retard high on mushrooms. My guess is the film maker's favorite saying is "Did Corky do good? I want pudding now!". Trust me when I say I am being overly kind. This kind of train wreck only draws the attention of the mentally ill, and now we know who some of you are, so we are watching you. I give it 500 thumbs down. I had to kill a lot of people to get those thumbs, so don't take this review lightly.

I saw TRASH HUMPERS at a screening in L.A. where Harmony Korine was there to introduce it and also do a Q&A afterwards. I was wildly disappointed with the lame array of questions that were thrown at him. Probably 90% were brainless, pointless, and uninteresting. The question I wanted to ask him was "is Trash Humpers in any way a statement or mockery on TRASH ART in general?". To me, this is how the movie came across. With a name like Trash Humpers, what else can you expect? It is one of the most pointless and trashiest movies I have ever seen - but that is exactly what I came for, and it effectively delivered that. It's full of humping, cussing, assorted offensive jokes, violence, vandalism, religion bashing, and anything else you'd expect in a trash art film. The difference is that with most trash art, the point is to try to shock you, scar you, or offend you. Trash Humpers, to me, seems more like it's doing these things in such a way that it's all a big joke - to take all of the other movies that have already done it, and re-enact them while giggling. After all, I feel that movies really are coming to a point where it is nearly impossible to shock people through exploitative sex, violence, etc. So why not find a nice comfortable place where we can live in that kind of world for an hour and a half and not try to shock anyone? We can just float through it and accept this demoralized joke of a world - that's the world that Trash Humpers creates to me. Unfortunately, when you start mocking your own genre or personal style of art, along with that comes the instinctive drive to take it to a far enough level where you are pushing people away. I felt that with several obnoxious things repeating throughout the film (such as Harmony's character constantly YELLING in your ear through entire scenes from right behind the camera) - he was showing signs of this kind of behavior. This is something I have observed from my own experiences as part of artistic projects, as well as observing friends mocking their own work. I have watched this kind of behavior occur with a lot of people towards the end of their artistic cycle. Of course, my interpretation of the movie could be completely off from how Harmony sees it. But, it's nice to have different perspectives isn't it? I enjoyed it - especially the fact that I got to see it in a theater with Harmony in attendance. But, I don't know if I'd ever want to watch it again. We'll always have Gummo for those endless viewings...

After my recent article about "Trash Humpers," I was graciously invited by the filmmakers to see it for myself. Honestly, I was excited going into the film, but nothing could prepare me for the film itself, which was equal parts humor and horror. The film, if you catch the title, is about a threesome (sometimes foursome) of elderly cretins that live on the outskirts of civilization. They spend the film smashing the cast offs of society, whether it's rubbish, old appliances, or even the human bodies. Once can sit and argue about the artistic merits of its Dogme 95 influence and Cinema Verite, but let's be honest. It's just ugly. All the characters (with the exception of one) are disgusting, vile, and boorish. The locations, mostly back alleys, side streets, and ruined homes, look awful. The props, costumes, and makeup are awful looking. The movie, shot with natural and available light on the long dormant VHS format, looks terrible. What's amazing about Trash Humpers is that was the intention by filmmaker Harmony Korine and his team all along. It was intended to be an artifact, something to be discovered fifty generations from now so that people in the future could see how society in the twenty-first century is depraved. Much like we now watch The Great Train Robbery and Birth of a Nation with quiet reverence, the students of the year 2300 will watch Trash Humpers and see what life was truly like for citizens in turn of the century America. They'll see the elderly gyrate their bodies on trash cans. They'll see small children deface babies. They'll see Siamese twins forced to make pancakes and then eat them with dish soap in lieu of syrup. The film is a thinly veiled metaphor for the fall of suburban consumer culture, where perfectly good items are discarded and destroyed. The amazing thing about this film is that you literally have no idea what's going to happen next. Unlike the current crop of by-the-numbers popcorn films that infest multiplexes this time of year, there's no "setup" or "payoff." No "good guys" or "bad guys." I can tell you right now this is the only film of the summer that will have baby dolls being dragged on the back of bicycles. What's exciting are the characters that occupy the frame, and after watching this film, I can tell you that people will be talking about this one for years to come.

Harmony Korine knows how to make a film that will interest audiences and have them talking about it for some time to come, Gummo is a prime example. whilst his last film Mister Lonely was perhaps his most mainstream effort, Trash Humpers presents itself with more accessibility than Gummo. But none the less, it's not a film that everyone will want to see and that was proved by the amount of walk outs during the screening, I counted perhaps 20. Nothing really happens in Trash Humpers, the characters, actors made to look old, literally do hump trash cans as well as an array of other inanimate objects, give branches oral sex, smash a variety of objects such as TV's and tap dance. There are surreal conversations and offensive jokes. But it never gets to offensive, it's never violent in an over the top way and in fact it's quite harmless, if not strange. It's also quite funny in parts, the acts we see are often so bizarre, you cannot help but laugh. It does become slightly more serious near the end and I began to wander when it would end, so is the repetition of what we see. The point of the film is less clear. Does it present a image of small town rednecks with nothing better to do than behave strangely? Perhaps. Maybe it presents the notion of being an anti film, crap and pointless, with the lowest standard of production values. It is perhaps just there to provide a conversation point on the very topic. In that it's perhaps interesting. Easily can be compared to Von Tries 'The Idiots', but that film at least had a coherent plot that whilst is a vile story, made sense, whilst Trash Humpers, doesn't and that's where for me the film falters. More reviews at my site iheartfilms.weebly.com

Oh my god, what the heyeeell is going on with this movie? Korine's latest film is a cinematic quasar. It's a jamboree of mad mad footage filmed as if on VHS: you actually get the auto-tracking banner come up on the screen a couple of times - which is pure nostalgia for me. It's meant to maybe be some weird found tape that you could have got in a job lot at a house sale or something. You've got these three people, two young men and a young woman, out cruising some semi-rural Southern suburbs, wearing masks that make them look liked wrinkled pensioners. They delight in sheerly bizarre behaviour, one of my very favourite scenes is the trio in a car park throwing up these fluorescent light strips way up into the air and then watching them smash. Also as the title of the movie implies, they hump trash cans. It's not all sick yet harmless frolics though, they do some pretty bad stuff too, although that's maybe for the viewer to interpret (what is this artifact we're seeing?). I've always liked movies where you get people "spassing", the von Trier's movie the Idiots, and the scene with the daughter and the nurse in Fassbinder's Chinese Roulette. And I recommend spassing to you too, do a little spassing, it is damned good fun, just do some dumb stuff, give yourself a break! This movie is a kind of dark homage to spassing. The point I think that is being made is, well OK, if you're going to say that this way of life that these people are following is stupid, how about your nine-to-five two-point-four-children prayers-on-Sunday life? I know which I prefer. The one great part of spassing is lunatic ditties, and I was reminded of being a kid again listen to these ones endlessly repeated, "Three little devils jumped over the wall, chopped of their heads and murdered them all"; "Make it, make it, don't take it, suck it, suck it, don't **** it". I wasn't shocked by anything the movie had to offer, however it is clear that this is going to offend a lot of folks, and the ending is really very deliberately provocative, so much so that I was giggling. If you showed this to the average bible-belter, they'd have an aneurysm. Pure genius.