And you thought Todd Solondz’s “Life During Wartime” contained freaks and geeks and was more than a little weird.
A few weeks ago a new project came out of nowhere. It wasn’t announced in the trades or anywhere else and jumped up as part of the Toronto International Film Festival’s line-up. The project was a new Harmony Korine film most people hadn’t heard about (aside maybe from the one person maintaining the Korine fansite, and even he didn’t know) called “Trash Humpers” and it was described as a down n’ dirty, lo-fi project or: “handheld video of a loser-gang cult-freak collective who do antisocial things in a non-narrative way, except for the song-and-dance numbers.”
Ha, sounded wonderfully perverse and odd, sure to be a bizarro curiosity. and now thanks to the TIFF site, we have a bunch of first-look images from the 78-minute experimental picture and an extended synopsis to tell us everything we need to know. Suffice to say there are no stars in this one, but the principal cast is listed as Rachel Korine (his wife, also featured in “Mister Lonely”), Brian Kotzue, Travis Nicholson and Korine himself.
The film features evidently, “creepy masks, low-grade torture, frequent public urination, senseless vandalism and the title, acted out on defenseless garbage cans, all have a confrontational panache about them to be sure. But the film is also full of poetry, dance, song and moments of aching poignancy.”
That’s about all the concrete info we get as TIFF has replaced basic bios with more flowery essays about the work of each auteur on hand, but still, it sounds and looks pretty weird and intriguing and probably more strange than “Gummo,” as there appears to be no real narrative to this one (though there is a screenplay credit for Korine, so perhaps there’s some through-line). Will you take the plunge? The film will make its world premiere on Saturday September 12 at TIFF. Hopefully we’ll also catch it while it’s there. As an astute reader points out, “Trash Humpers” was also just recently and quietly added to the New York Film Festival line-up.
