Trash Humpers (2009)
Harmony Korine has never been particularly interested in making audiences comfortable. The Kentucky-born writer and director first announced himself to the world as the teenage screenwriter of Larry Clark's Kids (1995), a film that rattled cages on both sides of the Atlantic, and he has spent the decades since constructing a body of work that sits at the outer edges of what mainstream cinema will tolerate. Gummo (1997), his directorial debut, divided critics sharply; Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) earned a Dogme 95 certificate and a reputation for being genuinely difficult to sit through. By 2009, Korine was very much an acquired taste, the kind of filmmaker whose new project gets written about in the arts press before anyone has seen a frame of it. Trash Humpers, produced with support from the British outfits Warp Films and Alcove Entertainment alongside O'Salvation, arrived trailing a certain notoriety from its festival circuit run, and it is worth being clear upfront about what kind of film it is actually presenting itself as.
The premise, such as it is, follows a small group of figures in latex old-man masks as they prowl the margins of Nashville, Tennessee. Korine shot and edited the film himself alongside editor Leo Scott, deliberately degrading the footage onto VHS tape to mimic the look of something recovered from a skip rather than screened in a cinema. It is not a found-footage horror film in any conventional sense, though horror is one of the genres it has been filed under. It is closer in spirit to a provocation disguised as a home movie, or perhaps a home movie disguised as art. The camcorder aesthetic is entirely intentional: the smeared colours, the tracking-line artefacts, the washed-out streetlight palette are all choices rather than limitations, Korine's way of placing the film somewhere outside normal cinematic time, in the same murky visual territory as a tape recorded over too many times. Composer Ryan Lawless contributes a score that sits underneath the action the way background noise sits underneath a bad dream, present but difficult to pin down. The cast, including Rachel Anna Simon, Brian Kotzur, Travis Nicholson, Seth Petterson, and Korine himself, are largely obscured behind their masks for the film's seventy-seven minutes, which is very much the point.
Korine has described Trash Humpers as a celebration of destruction and a portrait of outsiders who exist entirely beyond social contract. Whether you read it as a piece of anti-cinema, a genuinely transgressive artistic statement, or something considerably less considered than either of those framings, depends largely on your patience for work that refuses to meet the viewer halfway. It is worth noting that Warp Films, the Sheffield-based production company behind it, has a long track record of backing films that operate well outside the mainstream, so the institutional context here is at least consistent with what appears on screen. For a companion piece on a very different kind of British-backed film that pursues atmosphere over conventional narrative, see also Pontypool, and I also covered Meek's Cutoff, another film from roughly the same era that tests audience patience in pursuit of something deliberately uncomfortable and unresolved. Fans of work that uses the texture of its own image as meaning, rather than decoration, might also find Of Time and the City a more rewarding version of that particular experiment.
What in God's name did I just watch?
Trash Humpers is seventy-odd minutes of figures in rubbery old-man masks, the sort Johnny Knoxville and Spike Jonze wore in the first Jackass film, shot on deliberately degraded VHS, shuffling around Nashville cackling and, true to the title, humping bins and bin bags, with assorted unrelated odds and ends thrown in between.
It is the work of Harmony Korine, the man behind the neon delirium of Spring Breakers, who has even directed a few of David Blaine's television specials, so he can plainly make something coherent when he wants to. Here he simply does not want to.
I am aware this is meant to be a provocation, a piece of grubby anti-cinema you are supposed to recoil from, and on that narrow measure it succeeds completely. But knowing the intent did nothing to make sitting through it worthwhile. It is one of the worst things I have ever put in front of my own eyes, if you can even call it a film, and it is far too long for something whose entire idea you have grasped inside two minutes. Half a star, and my advice is to watch those two minutes, should you feel you must, and reclaim the other seventy-six.
Trash Humpers sits in a long tradition of films that weaponise their own unwatchability as a critical position, works designed to make you question whether your discomfort is the point or merely the by-product. That is a legitimate artistic question, and Korine is not the first filmmaker to ask it. What the film asks of its audience is genuine, and the craft choices behind its apparent artlessness are, on reflection, considered ones. Whether considered artlessness is something you want to spend an evening with is a different matter entirely, and one the review above answers with some feeling. Some films dare you not to walk out. A few of them are worth the dare.
Rating: ½ | Year: 2009 | Watched: 2026-09-17
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Trash Humpers (2009) on YouTube
