Trash Humpers

Imagine if you salvaged a grubby VHS tape off  the roadside only to discover it contained outtakes from an amateur ‘Jackass’ knock-off. That’s what the new ‘movie’ from scurrilous trash-art guru Harmony Korine feels like. It’s an interminable montage of bin-based horseplay, appliance smashing, high-pitched yowling and affected bad taste that’s fully aware of its own wilful derangement. Plus, it’s all carried out by four actors (including Korine and his wife, Rachel) wearing prosthetic OAP masks and gaudy dimestore threads. With its free-associative style and scuzzy VHS aesthetic, the film suggests Korine is trying to recapture the scintillating Southern-gothic poetry of ‘Gummo’, his sublime 1998 debut, while casting off the glossy production-value shackles of his lacklustre 2007 film ‘Mister Lonely’ – but he only succeeds in bastardising the style of the former while achieving the low quality of the latter. Of course, there will be a core nucleus of hardened Korinites who will happily cheer along with every pelvic thrust, but for everyone else, this is a puerile and bafflingly hollow work.