Trash Humpers
Dir: Harmony Korine

In Harmony Korine’s latest film, a gang of marauding, hideously deformed old people terrorize suburban Nashville in their wheelchairs. They smash fluorescent bulbs and drag baby dolls behind them on their bikes. These trash humpers literally hump large plastic trash bins on the street. They fellate shrubbery leaves and masturbate cylindrical objects they find. They are known to engage in cruel pancake thuggery, and siamese twin bullying.

This is not a conventional movie by any means — there’s only the barest of a narrative. It’s shot on coarse video, with PLAY and RECORD occasionally appearing on the screen. Sounds, words and songs (about angels and devils), are constantly inserted into the soundtrack, seemingly at random. At the TIFF screening, Harmony explained Trash Humpers like this: Everyone probably knows Field Of Dreams — “if you build it, they will come”. This movie is the opposite: “If you destroy it, they will come on you.”

Trash Humpers is a nihilistic piece of art, somewhere between a film and an installation, like a non-stop, giant youtube clip projected onto a movie screen. It’s terrible, and it’s brilliant.