The world of exploitation film ripped open and laid raw for you to experience. From 70's grindhouse to current underground, it is all here. So ripe you can practically smell it.
I really try to not do bad reviews just
for the sake of writing shitty reviews. I also tend to shy away from
filmmakers working on the same budget level I have just because I
don't want to be a dick to people. But sometimes shit just happens
and you end up watching something like ZOMBIE BABIES.
This ultra low budget flick is about a
couple of redneck idiots who decide to open a makeshift abortion
clinic/slash vacation getaway. A group of inane dudes all with very
pregnant girlfriends arrive and most of them get on screen coat
hanger abortions. But the problem is the rednecks also have a moonshine still
in the basement filled with radioactive slop that brings the fetuses
back to life.
Never mind the fact this movie was
already made as THE SUCKLING in the late 80's or a big plot device is
lifted wholesale from REDNECK ZOMBIES. This movie fails on almost all
the levels it sets out to attempt. I'm not even gonna rag on the out
of focus photography, inconsistent sound and special effects where
you can see the puppeteers as much as the rest of the cast. I'd let
all that shit go if it was actually funny or scary or just irreverent
enough to recommend. But it is none of those things. The dialogue,
being performed largely by non actors, is endless and painful. The
humor consists of many variants of shit being expelled onto people,
and lots of sex humor that just ultimately degrades the actors and
finally the audience for watching it.
I am struggling to find something
positive to say, so Ruby Larocca is good as usual as is Kaylee
Williams who really should choose her projects a little more in line
with her talent. Shawn C. Phillips is once again on hand playing a
big fat guy; sweating, exposing himself and just basically being
degraded. The dude is a funny guy, I just wish he would stop letting
directors make fun of him on screen.
There is a very weird pre-natal sexual
vibe, running through the movie with one Zombie Baby getting his
asshole licked until he shits on the dude doing it, and Ruby almost
swallowing a severed baby dick that comes all over her face when she
pulls it out of her mouth. The scenes are clearly aiming to be
shocking, but just come off as unpleasant and a more than a bit unsavory.
Just when you think the movie is
feeling like it has been on for hours and hours, they clearly run
out of money when one scene cuts to comic book art to fill in the
action and it mercifully ends on what should be a shock ending, but
happens so fast it is meaningless.
To say I can't recommend this is an
understatement.
Day twenty of the September Exploitation Challenge (yes I have fallen WAY behind) is when I took out the trash...
TRASH HUMPERS (2010) D. Harmony Korine Alcove Entertainment Shot on VHS!!!
I will freely admit I went into this wanting to hate it. Figuring I would hate it. The trailer doesn’t try to sell it for anything it is not. The movie is basically just Harmony Korine and a couple of other people dressed in cheap joke store old people mask, running around acting stupid and literally humping trash cans. To make matters worse it is shot on old school sub-standard VHS equipment, edited between two VCR’s (the play, pause and rewind on screen displays have as much screen time as some of the characters) complete with tape drop out and fucked up color balance. The whole thing is designed to look cheap, immature, and like it was done by people with no skills or talent. I suppose the argument here is that the movie is designed to be “anti-art” or “anti-filmmaking” since Korine was part of Lars Von-Trier’s whole DOGMA 95 deal back in the day, and Korine’s best film came out of his time working within those constraints (I am immensely fond of JULIAN DONKEY BOY, but generally detest the dude’s other work). So maybe that is his point. Or maybe he was just screwing around. Who knows.
"One critic called this JACKASS for the Psuedo-intellectual set. I can see that being accurate."
Which ever, he managed what would have been completely impossible had any other person made this exact same movie. He got it released, put into major festivals, it played art house theaters and now is seeing the light of day not only on DVD but in some rather cool special edition packaging. Had any other underground filmmaker made this exact same movie they would have been laughed out of town, called an idiot, and had their equipment smashed. Their career would be effectively over. But oddly enough Korine has seen some of the better reviews he has gotten in a long time. Which I think goes to show that a cult of personality can certainly get you a long long way in ths business.
"Trash collection for the 21st century."
But what is most important is the actual work itself. Irregardless of my wanting to hate it because of everything I state above, I actually did not. TRASH HUMPERS is far from a good movie, hell you almost cannot even call it a movie, but there is a certain quality about it that becomes mesmerizing after a while. While most of it is inane, stupid, puerile and without a purpose, once in a while there are images that stumble across the screen to grab hold of the mind’s eye and stay there. Sometimes those will be humorous such as the little bespectacled kid in the three piece suite explaining the proper way to bash a baby doll's head in. Sometimes it is just a flash of beautiful scenery or landscape. By the half hour mark I found myself wondering if Korine knew, or even cared what he was putting on screen at all, or if this was just complete randomness. Then suddenly there is a jarring shot of a nude dead body, laying in a field, just like a piece of trash the movie has been obsessing over. This feels like the filmmakers just found this dead man and shot it for the movie (though clearly they did not). At this point I became aware that the cameraman is supposed to be a character in the movie too as he is singing a little nursery rhyme about “three little devils who jumped over a wall” as he surveys this corpse. The moment is supremely haunting. Maybe because so much of the half hour leading up was so deadening, I don’t know? But it got my attention. From this point on a tiniest thread of a plot had started to emerge in which the four characters we have been watching fuck around, break shit and hump trash are also traveling around killing people. There seems to be an obsession with baby dolls going on throughout the proceedings (one of the “characters” is female it is important to note) which eventually ties in to a haunting and surprisingly, in its own twisted way, tender finale.
"I think she was one of my high school teachers."
The movie is still more of an art piece/ endurance test than an actual film, but in the second half it at least starts to resemble a narrative. With more of the startling and haunting moments seeming to be on purpose as opposed to things that just happened to be in front of the camera at the right time.
TRASH HUMPERS might be best described as a movie to watch once. It might be fun to see in an art theater with a crowd though. To see who it pisses off and who over pontificates it to the point of great art. Because at the end of the day I still get the feeling Harmony Korine is having a laugh at the art scene that has embraced him as much as he was just tooling around fucking off while making the movie. But to my shock and surprise his end product has something there to offer when I seriously thought it would not at all.
WARNING: Even for the material normally discussed and contained on this blog, the following pictures and video may be objectionable and disturbing. The following contains images of real death and embalming, so proceed with caution.
Orozco The Embalmer (2001) D. Tsurisaki KiyotakaCinema ObscuraS.O.V.
Widely considered to be one of the must brutal and in your face of the mondo-documentaries that has floated around the underground in recent years, OROZCO THE EMBALMER has gathered a reputation that's proceeded it. Mostly by gorehound death fetishists that don't understand, nor care enough to look beyond the guts being spilled on screen to see the spiritual, political or just plain human context they may be watching. All they want to see is bodies being ripped open and blood splashed all over the place. This movie delivers that in a matter of fact manner that puts films like FACES OF DEATH or even the turgid and offensive FACES OF GORE series to shame. But at the same time there is an exploration of a real person here, who does a very real job, in a very real place, that very much resembles hell on Earth.
Orozco is an embalmer in one of the poorest, most crime ridden grottoes in Columbia. It is not uncommon here to see someone gunned down in the street, or for cars to run someone over and reduce them to paste in some sort of drug fueled vendetta. A life of crime is basically the only way to survive in this place and people die all the time.
Even the stray dogs have to take time to get plastered up to heal after street warfare in Columbia.
Hell, even the stray dog's are not safe. Orozco's business is booming due to this. But at the same time, he understands that the people he serves are poor and suffering, so he charges less than the city hospitals for an embalming and he makes his services affordable to the people he lives and works among. He also hires as assistants people from the neighborhood, including a local mentally handicapped man and that man's son who he has basically almost adopted as his own and is training.
Orozco finishes dressing a dead child for a funeral, while the parent waits patiently in the wings.
But don't let all this selflessness fool you - Orozco is one grumpy son of a bitch. The daily grind of cutting people open for little pay obviously gets to him. He is an old man now, the lines of a life that has battered the shit out of him are etched on his face. He barely seems to blink, and his mouth is always down turned in a frown. He applies his trade in a swift and aggressive manner, cutting into the bodies he is working on as someone would expect a butcher to attack a side of beef. Chunking his knives into the flesh hard and fast, tearing into abdominal cavities to release bloated gases, pockets of settled blood, and sack after sack of gorged internal organs that are simply in his way. He is not performing an autopsy, his job is to relieve the body of the artifacts that are going to start decaying soon that will prevent the body from being in a funeral service. He might even go as far as to apply make up if he deems it necessary for that particular person, though he has pretty strong opinions on that matter, expressing about one corpse "why paint this person up like a clown now, when that never looked like that when they were alive?" The brain is always removed and replaced with newspaper because that rots away the quickest and will smell immediately. It is all a daily grind for him: body after body, old men, women, and occasionally little babies or children. Sometimes he will notice things the hospitals or morgues have missed, such as an elderly corpse on his table he clearly notices had been abused while alive, but the cause of death does not indicate such. But he steps away from saying anything, claiming that to do so would only start trouble. Orozco was in the military when he was much younger but refuses to talk about it, as well as his time in the police. He clearly saw things that were quite awful, illegal things, murderous things. Things in which to spend his days among the dead is not terribly different.
A typical way someone ends the day in Columbia now and again.
The documentary crew visit one of the local hospital morgues to watch how they do their embalming, which is no more high tech than Orozco. In fact, in some ways it is just as savage. They take more time in the clean up, with more make up and prep for the funeral, but the actual cutting up and discarding of parts it is no different. Still, the embalmer has no problem talking shit about Orozco and his team. In a weird and out of place bit, the documentary director begins to talk off camera to the embalmer about the corpse and how it has a "really pretty hairy pussy" which kinda comes out of nowhere. Once that is said, though, it does sort of make you notice that a lot of the camera work has included crotch shots of the corpses which seemed a bit unnecessary. And very, very weird.
Which leads me to the movie's biggest detriment, the direction. The movie has a truly fascinating subject with Orozco, and the actual town in Columbia, but the direction itself is beyond sloppy, with many long, useless montages of life in the street (all set to the same droning, repetitive music) that just pad out the movie. There is one long aside of a drug addict allowing the camera to follow him to a corner in an alley to smoke crack, that has nothing to do with the movie at all. Then there is that weird sort of leering sexual asides the movie takes form time to time, the worse being the bit at the hospital morgue, where the camera seems to linger on a corpses genitals or breasts just a bit too long, which seems really fucked up.
The brain is removed to prevent stink of decay during any services the family may ask upon.
When I mentioned this on a message board someone mentioned that this film started life as an episode of the DEATH FILES series in Japan which is just a Mondo Death footage series (and one of the most brutal and outrageous). That series is just footage of dead people, usually at accidents in third world countries (of which there is plenty of here) or murder sites (once again plenty of that here). One of the most famous of that series was an off shoot called DEATH WOMEN which is just that, random footage of the corpses of women at accidents, murder scenes, morgues etc. Seems this director cut his teeth working on those series, and then make some short "art" films called JUNK FILMS which were basically more of the same. Orozco was originally intended to be more of this until he got a hold of such a fascinating subject and it become something entirely new. And that saves it. The focus on Orozco himself gives it all context and form, as well a lot of social dynamic as he explains how these people live and die.
Certainly well worth watching if you can stomach it. But be warned it IS as rough as you've heard.
