Indeed, Trash Humpers is at once a bona fide midnight movie and a work so aesthetically appalling, so radical and pure in its documentation of the dregs of society, that distribution in a market outside film festivals is completely incomprehensible. Korine, whose father shot documentaries for PBS, said he envisioned the film as a found object or, as the press notes more dramatically put it, 'unearthed from the buried landscape of the American nightmare.' Either way, it seems that the emphasis remains on the film being lost, underground, or tossed away into one of the trash receptacles that the titular cretins so arduously gyrate against.
Played by Korine, his wife Rachel, Travis Nicholson and Brian Kotzur, drummer for indie rockers Silver Jews, the Humpers roam the back-lots and alleys of the south, make friends with pornographic troubadours and rednecks and spread their own special brand of bedlam. When we first encounter them, banging against garbage cans in a back alley and hidden by old-man masks, they are certainly discomfiting but they have not yet entered the realm of dangerous. In fact, one of the most disturbing elements of Korine's film is that he comes to the more heinous acts -- the aftermath of a bludgeoning, stealing a baby, suffocating a man with a plastic bag while one man laughs and the other delivers a guitar solo -- in a well-paced, completely believable way.
The Humpers pound and screw, break and bash, holler and cackle throughout the film, but only twice does any sort of manifesto arise. One comes from a doomed poet who sings folk songs in a chambermaid's outfit and casts the Humpers as the inevitable byproducts of consumerism. The other comes from head Humper and camera man Hervé who opines that the day-to-day, wife-and-kids, and two-story home mentality is sick and perverse. It's the only time the film feels like it is about to topple into compulsive rhetoric, but it recovers quickly and mayhem, once again, reigns.
Chaos is at the heart of the film and, befittingly, there are any number of ways to read the text: A feral mirror image of the post-Confederacy, a lunatic indictment of artistic 'maturity' and a smart bomb chucked under the made bed of sexual mores all at once. But by casting himself and his wife as the leads, Korine has certainly made Trash Humpers his most personal work, removing the detached incessancy of his other films, and it is, to this reviewer at least, one of the most haunting and unique horror films to be conceived this decade. Many have likened it to Korine's inept breakthrough Gummo, but Humpers is closer in DNA to two other 'outsider' films: John Waters' Pink Flamingos (obviously) and the chilling French mockumentary Man Bites Dog. Like both of those films, its release in any major form seems, to put it kindly, unlikely, but it already has the makings of a cult film dressed in its own mythology.
Reviewed as part of the 2009 New York Film Festival.
