I told my brother I was reviewing a film called Trash Humpers, and he said, “Oh, they’re probably using ‘hump’ to mean carrying or hauling, like, ‘I gotta hump this trash out to the landfill.’” And I told him that knowing what I do about the filmmaker, no, it’s probably about people who literally hump trash. In fact, I said, I should be grateful if the trash humping is the least unpleasant thing that happens.
The filmmaker is Harmony Korine, who wrote Larry Clark’s Kids and Ken Park and made his own Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy, and Mister Lonely. He’s a provocateur, a mix of John Waters, Werner Herzog, and Lars von Trier, only (in my opinion) not as talented as any of them. Trash Humpers is not only pointless but, it would seem, intentionally pointless, a tedious slog that appears to have been made for the express purpose of annoying the audience. It succeeds at that, so I guess I have to give it a good review.
The title characters are three, or sometimes four, elderly people who wander the streets of an unnamed city humping trash cans and screeching. It is unclear what, if any, sexual pleasure they derive from the humping. They don’t speak much. Mostly they just make screeching noises and destroy stuff (discarded electronics, an abandoned house, and so forth). Sometimes they peep through people’s windows. One of them videotapes their activities, and the movie is in the form of “found footage,” meant to look like a battered old VHS tape. (In that case, Korine shouldn’t have shot it in widescreen, but never mind.)
Filed under: Independent, New Releases, SXSW, Theatrical Reviews, Festival Reports
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