The Trash Humpers are running through the streets of Nashville, causing chaos everywhere they go, which mostly means making people eat pancakes covered in soap, choking out baby dolls with plastic bags and killing a poet. They’re also all mostly old men or men wearing old man masks. They are very dada; nothing means anything. Momma (Rachel Korine), the only female member, kidnaps a child to add some meaning to her life, while the man recording all of this, Hervé (Harmony Korine), at least tries to explain to the viewer the ethos of the group.

One night, as he looked at trash cans in the moonlight, Korine remembered a gang of old men peeping toms who would come out at night, referring to them as “the neighborhood boogeymen who worked at Krispy Kreme and would wrap themselves in shrubbery, cover themselves with dirt, and peep through the windows of other neighbors.” Using video — yes, SOV — made the images softer and less sharp, which he was looking for. It was even edited on two VCRs.

The tracking errors and static make the viewer feel like a voyeur watching something they aren’t supposed to see. A snuff film of human dignity, I guess. This feels like the kind of movies we filmed as kids and then realized we’d get arrested if anyone found them.

I’d like to say that when the Trash Humpers scream “Make it, make it don’t fake it!” or cackle while smashing televisions, they aren’t protesting society; they are simply existing outside of it. They’re celerating the discarded: people, formats (VHS) and things. Did I go too A24 with this? Korine said, “I wanted to make a film that looked like it had been found in a bag of trash on the side of the road, or buried in a basement.” 

You can download this from the Internet Archive.