Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine, 2009): USA/UK

Reviewed by Byron Potau. Viewed at Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, CA. as part of the 2009 AFI Film Festival.

Prior to the start of the film writer/director Harmony Korine gave the audience fair warning that if they were of the mind that they might walk out on this film then they will. Neither this declaration nor anything Korine has done before can prepare you for how utterly appalling, repulsive, and meaningless Trash Humpers is.

This pseudo documentary follows a kind of dysfunctional family of four, in blatantly grotesque makeup that makes them look like the grandpa from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as they literally hump trash cans, destroy property, and encounter creepy, deep south, redneck characters dressed in anything from hospital patient gowns with the backs open to French maid outfits. Some of these characters they stab and bludgeon to death, others they suffocate. Throughout the film they have an unsettling fixation on abusing talking baby dolls, often dragging them tied to a bicycle, and at one time teaching a young boy to suffocate one in a plastic bag and beat its face in with a hammer. About the only thing they don’t do to it is hump it. I guess Korine didn’t want his characters totally devoid of morals. The above acts, especially the trash humping, property destruction in fields, alleyways and abandoned houses, and the doll abuse, is repeated again and again filling most of the film’s running time along with some annoying, cackling laughter, and some oft repeated, ear stabbing phrases like “make, don’t fake it”.

Korine stated that he made the film to be like a sort of found object, something discovered in an attic or found in a ditch that was never intended to see the light of day, and you will really wish it never had. To give you an idea of what watching this film was like, imagine the most annoying noise you have ever heard, and then imagine hearing that noise for seventy eight minutes straight while someone smacked you in the back of the head and kicked you in the groin. That Korine gave fair warning about the offensiveness of his film does not excuse putting this kind of trash on a screen.

Shot, with some effect, on video to look like an old VHS tape with moments of snow and auto tracking, the film has no real plot, following these depraved vandals around like a home movie as they portray the absolute worst nightmare of human beings. Korine has shown a predilection toward this kind of depraved, freakish character in the past, but never quite this pornographically sickening. I think John Waters would be disgusted! The only real point to the film seems to be to shock and upset which it certainly does, but otherwise there is no earthly reason to ever see this film. His attempts to provoke have only led him further and further away from any real filmmaking and any talent Korine might have had seems to have completely vanished as this is certainly in the running for the worst film ever made! Nevertheless, the film seems to have some fans who find poignancy and meaning, even beauty and poetry, in Korine’s band of perverted malformations. Go figure.