Trash Humpers

For those not familiar with Harmony Korine, he is a indie hipster icon, director and creator of extraordinarily bizarre characters. He has a knack for inventing interesting and fucked up scenarios and derranged humans that inhabit them, and exploiting them in his films, which unfortunately sometimes leads to a bit of film wank.

In Trash Humpers, we follow four seemingly elderly and incredibly deranged vagrants as they traipse across the great suburban sprawl of america, humping trash cans, trees and mailboxes. Along the way they encounter different suburbanites, fellow weirdos, and take up residence in their houses. The whole thing is shot on VHS handy cam, which is both one of the films highlights as well as it’s downfall. I can imagine that if it had’ve been filmed a little more “Traditionally” it would’ve been more accessible to certain crowds, but as it’s never really been used before in the world of the feature film, I found it quite interesting.

Unfortunately though, the film never really goes anywhere. It plods along, stringing together a series of home movies of these deranged old people, as they hump whatever they can, and boss other weirdos around into doing things for them, like eating soap covered pancakes. There are some great ideas in the film, but that’s not really enough to sustain it.

It’s almost as if Korine’s just slapped it together as quickly as he could, cause he needed to make a quick buck. (NOTE: Apparently this is the case after all…Mister Lonely drove Korines production company to bankruptcy so he needed to create something asap to break even).

Like I said, some entertaining aspects, interestingly bizarre characters, but really not enough to carry the viewers attention for an hour and fifteen minutes.

TWO AND A HALF STARS