They hump trash and screech. Different kinds of trash sometimes.

Harmony Korine warned us, and a lot of people didn’t listen. I caught a screening of his latest feature, the micro-budget freak-out acid test that is Trash Humpers, at a screening at like 10 on a Tuesday morning at TIFF, in a half-full jumbo theatre at the Scotiabank movie omni-plex downtown. He seemed sheepish as he was introduced, the one time enfant terrible who wrote Kids at 22 and made Gummo a few years later, saying “… all the people who’d want to see the film are still in bed”. He plead with us, saying, “If you’re the kind of person that walks out of films, just… walk out right now, please”. Nobody did, not at that point, anyway.

Trash Humpers is really easy to explain and really hard to deal with, and it might be great. I’m not smart enough to really know, and although I know a lot of smart people like it, I find people that are smart enough to have argument-worthy opinions about the relative worth of these things to be untrustworthy. I certainly liked it (a great deal), when I wasn’t actively wishing it was over. The film is intended to function like a piece of faux-found art, a “tape you’d find in the gutter”, complete with poor tracking and video-toasteresque titles. Korine, in costume and character records his friends (accomplices? confederates?), actors put into gruesome old-face, the kind of geriatricization that Spike Jonze and Johnny Knoxville employed in Jackass, except these actors aren’t intended to pass: they’re made old, and made weird. None of the characters lips or eyes move properly, and the female character’s skin has a distinct greenish tinge. And nothing else on the characters is made up – they have the hands and legs and arms of young people – and they smash boomboxes, cinder blocks and lightbulbs with psychotic, aggressive youthful enthusiasm.

Korine calls his film “an ode to vandalism”, which it could be. The four characters break things, get drunk and murder people, abduct children, pour soap on pancakes, screech and screech and screech. He’s made a follow-up to Gummo that has abandoned that film’s semi-traditional aesthetic beauty, its colour and vibrancy, as well as its hopefulness, what hopefulness there was in it anyway. Trash Humpers is a film about America 10 years later, about America where people upload 20 year-old snuff tapes of ill people being murdered by karate instructors to youtube. It’s dark and difficult and really really interesting, if hard to sit through (certainly for the 20 or so people who didn’t take Korine at his word and walked out halfway through the film). It’s certainly not going to win him any new fans, but for people that me that love his work, it’s a thing of gross-ass beauty and legitimate, considered depth. 8/10.