Watching “Trash Humpers” might make the viewer think they’ve stumbled across some senior citizen’s snuff film. Shot and edited with a hand-held video camera, the actors wear grotesque old-age masks and makeup, hunched over and shuffling like crippled denizens of a retirement home. But any resemblance to the feeble and aged ends there. Clip after clip show these “ancient” vandals infiltrating suburban America to smash household items, sodomize vegetation, defecate, and of course hump trash cans. This is an anarchic celebration of destruction; the oldsters laughing and dancing in their mayhem, singing nursery rhymes of murder. A freak show of outrageous characters are visited, including a joined-at-the-head Siamese twin and transvestite poet, each spouting a sometimes hilarious monologue or a civilization-destroying rant. During a night time neighborhood drive one of the trash humpers remarks, “We choose to live like free people”, mocking the residents of the houses, soon to rise and prepare for work, as “A stupid way to live.” The makers of “Trash Humpers” reflect a grisly, distorted mirror on our terminal civilization, firing a big middle finger to the world and the audience.
Trash Humpers
Directed by Harmony Korine
USA 2009
Trailer
Willis Wong
(Intermedias reviewer at VIFF)