Trash Humpers (2009)
Average Rating: 5/10
Reviews Counted: 36
Fresh: 20 | Rotten: 16
It's oddly affecting in a deeply discomfiting way, but Trash Humpers pales in comparison with Harmony Korine's earlier, truly transgressive work.
Average Rating: 4.6/10
Critic Reviews: 9
Fresh: 4 | Rotten: 5
It's oddly affecting in a deeply discomfiting way, but Trash Humpers pales in comparison with Harmony Korine's earlier, truly transgressive work.
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Average Rating: 2.9/5
User Ratings: 822
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Americana goes rancid in writer/director Harmony Korine's tale of three elderly cretins who brutalize dolls, molest fauna, and force themselves on garbage cans. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
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All Critics (36) | Top Critics (9) | Fresh (20) | Rotten (17) | DVD (1)
Imagine if you salvaged a grubby VHS tape off the roadside only to discover it contained outtakes from an amateur Jackass knock-off.
Top CriticThis interminable piece of crap copped a big prize at the 2009 Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival.
The crass, fuzzy beauty of VHS' defiantly crisp-free recording technology gives haunting visual power to both the empty-parking-lot dreariness of day and the harsh, lamplit hum of night.
For the brave souls who make it to the end, there should at least be no question of the movie's sincerity.
However crassly delivered, Mr. Korine's warning against over-consumption is unambiguous: these savages are our future, our "true seed." The only surprise is that he didn't include a shot of one of them violating this film.
It's about as enervating a way to waste 78 minutes as I've ever experienced.
The most shocking thing about Trash Humpers is that it's boring...at times, hellishly annoying, but virtually never offensive.
In one scene of "Trash Humpers," the camera lingers on an abandoned toilet in the middle of a field, as voices cackle off-camera. The filmography of Harmony Korine, ladies and gentlemen!
Viewers unfamiliar with Korine's alternative style of filmmaking may walk out in disgust. But if you're willing to broaden your cinematic expectations to include the utterly random, it's a must-see.
Mostly it is just repulsive but occasionally it's beguiling, and at these points it feels like Korine is getting at something, showing us exactly what we don't want to see...
There's no plot to speak of, but the mayhem Korine captures is oddly engrossing, like a twisted piece of performance art.
Trash Humpers, far being an authentic expression of the American Id, is a nostalgic lament for an era in which Korine's films could be held up, rightly or wrongly, as transgressive. No longer.
There's no real narrative, just three folk in latex OAP masks snorting and cackling through a series of often noctural adventures with wheelchairs, hookers and undead-looking street poet types.
It is an exercise in experimental provocation and in pure insolence, while sometimes being horribly funny and fascinating, reviving the spirit of Tod Browning's Freaks and the ice-cold vision of Diane Arbus.
It's a typical Korine move: gesture towards seriousness, and then undercut it in the name of puerility. Or is it post-political cynicism?
As funny as it is horrific, and as beautiful as it is repulsive, Harmony Korine has crafted one of the most fully-formed (and undeniably affecting) art movies of recent years.
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.
As close to unwatchable as cinema gets, Harmony Korine's latest stab at alienating his audience seems perversely designed to test the loyalty of those who stuck with the underground auteur through Gummo and Mister Lonely.
This is counter-cinema at its best. For every insipid, corporate-led blockbuster that comes hurtling out of Hollywood, something as gross, coarse and provocative as Trash Humpers must counteract, if just to remind us of the power of film.
A often grim vaudeville parade of Nashville's oddballs and ne'er-do-wells.
A gang ofelderly morons have sex with garbage. What more can I say about Trash Humpers?
Demented, juvenile and utterly pretentious nonsense that comes across like a senile version of Jackass crossed with white trash performance art, yet it's also strangely enjoyable and has future cult hit written all over it.
a painful and deadly dull slog that tries to approximate the outrages of early underground cinema without bringing anything new to the table.
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