Gummo Reviews

• Like nothing you've ever seen on TV

  
  By A1L1S42BOGPF96 on 2003-05-27
  Director Harmony Korine may or may not be the latest "enfant terrible," but he's certainly given us something to think about with "Gummo." He's given us about 90 minutes of in-your-face immersion into a culture that most of us only glimpse in "Cops" and other "reality" programs that deal with the hopeless, hapless people who make up the bottom strata of White America.
  We suddenly find ourselves immersed in a culture where single moms huff glue with their teenage sons and their buddies and where boys hunt neighborhood cats with BB guns and sell the carcasses to a guy who supplies meat to Chinese restaurants. As the story develops, we learn the boys spend their cat money on glue and the services of a young prostitute who looks like Anna Nicole Smith with a lobotomy.
  This movie is like a train wreck - at once horrifying and mesmerizing.
  I disagree with an earlier reviewer who saw "Gummo" as an outrageous piece of elitism.
  I think that charge misses the point. This is not some arrogant exposé of the quaint ways of the poor, it's a 90-minute tour of the self-perpetuating Culture of Stupidity that can be found on the fringes of every city and town in America. These are people who turn bad choices into a way of life because that's what their parents did and their parents before them. Yes, Korine packs the screen with enough geeks and freaks to populate a dozen circus sideshows, but his point is well taken. This is a strata of society that Hollywood ignores, except for the occasional cameo role in films like "Deliverance." It's a vision of a reality that we recognize instantly from our day-to-day experience, but which is carefully filtered out of the mass media.
  Whether Korine has talent or promise in any convential sense of the words remains to be seen, but he's created a unique film that is destined to become a cult classic.
  But, as an earlier reviewer noted, this is not a suitable date night substitute for "Casablanca" or "The Sound of Music."
  
  

• There's something about Gummo...

  
  By A2UYAFQ40U2PHS on 2006-06-15
  If you describe this film to people, and tell them you like it, they'll think you're insane and disturbed. It's a documentary/collage like film about white trash. Some advertisements for the film have tried to portray it as a comedy, but it isn't. It's mostly vignettes from the town of Xenia, Ohio, where white trash and their values reign supreme. Cat killers (no cats were actually harmed), paying for sex with mentally handicapped people, white trash beating up chairs, and paint huffing are some of the attractions you'll see here. But Korine edits and films it in, dare I say, an artistic and interesting way. There is something going on here. This was an independent movie, but most indie movies are just quirky films that aren't that different than what mainstream Hollywood gives us. This is a real independent film. Korine films in 8mm, video, 16mm, and 35mm. He doesn't seem interested in crossover appeal with his work. He captures the despair and nihilism of these white trash denziens. And some of the images stick in your mind, like the kid taking a bath at the end eating spaghetti in a filthy tub. Korine has made only 2 features, but they are both certainly worth watching, and quite beautiful, in their own, strange way. This is a very good film....
  
  
  
  
  

• ART FILM OR TRASH EPIC?

  
  By ABPXEF2D2QTS on 2000-11-20
  Gummo is one of those movies that tries its best to pass itself off as art, but deep down inside it is nothing more than 90 minutes of white trash coping with living in a horrible world. Personally, I love this movie, and if you look at it with the right sense of humor, its extremly funny! Glue sniffing kids kill cats for money! A kid in bunny ears wanders aimlessly and urinates off of overpasses! Blond girls pull electrical tape off of their nipples to make them bigger! Drunk rednecks wrestle chairs! A child eats in filthy bathtub water and works out by lifting utensils! With a retarded prostitute and an african-american gay midget! Basically its John Water's Pink Flamingos, only this isn't supposed to be funny. See it once, just to say that you saw it. One of the strangest films to emerge in years! If you don't feel dirtier after viewing this movie, then I don't want to know how you live!
  
  

• The most hateful piece of elitism I've ever laid eyes on.

  
  By A6AKUMA7VFZN7 on 2003-01-08
  In a time when the film world is filled with art-house geeks(myself included) and resentment for the Hollywood conglomorate is abundant, there are films like this that seem to come out of that very hatred for the system. Harmony Korine is one of those angry geeks too, but all he knows how to express is anger and hatred towards, well, everything inside and outside of his films. After writing the screenplay for the controversial film "Kids" at only the age of 19, he goes on to make his first feature, "Gummo", a pseudo-documentary presented in a series of disconnected vingnettes that pretends to comment on how life in Ohio is once all is lost by a series of devastating tornadoes. It enraptured film artists like Werner Herzog and seemed to create a small fanbase for Korine. He would later go on to make America's first Dogma 95 film, "julien-donkey boy". Many have said "Gummo" will digust and disturb but also mesmerize and provide profound artful insight into the minds of all that see it. Sure not everything is made for everyone, but there's a place for everything and all things should be looked at. I tried to keep this in mind while watching "Gummo".

  After having seen it, I've come to the conclusion that what it really is is pure angry elitism, distancing itself from the characters in the film by indirectly poking fun at them, and distancing itself from the audience by stating it's superiority to those who fail to understand it. First of all, Harmony Korine admittedly didn't attend film school, but perceives himself to know everything about the art of film production. He claims to "change the way" we see movies. What he really ends up doing is spitting in everyone's face. There's this underlying pretense that says because stupid Hollywood films are glossy and sound really nice, it's artful to go in the opposite direction. Consider the scene where the sisters rip electric tape off of their nipples(what's being said here?) and they bounce about on the beds to Buddy Holly's "Everyday". Korine then cuts to one of the girls dangling her tongue about erotically with the music no longer being sung by Buddy Holly, but by a terribly recorded version of the song by the cast members that's not only barely audible, but irritating to the ears. Watching this sums up the entire idea of the movie, that in order for it to be artful, it has to look and sound really ugly. Intelligent or insightful? On what? That beneath the surface of a perfect world, the world really looks like the sinkhole in "Gummo"? Oh dear, I've learned a lot from your "life experiences" that only YOU know about. Idiotic, pretentious and self-aggrandizing? Most certainly.
  
  The final message of "Gummo" pretty much says in no uncertain terms, that if you are poor you are a circus freak. If you lose everything to a tornado, you'll want to kill cats and sell their dead bodies to sniff glue. If you have no money, you and your children will turn into white trash and attack boys dressed in rabbit suits that [tinkle] off of highway overpasses, play an accordian on a toilet, and run to the camera to hold a dead cat in front of it. "Gummo" is the cinematic equivalent of the painting of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung and paper cutouts of testicles strewn about it. It gives the arthouses and independent film movements a bad name. Harmony Korine is an angry geek who ran around with a camera enough to produce something that feels like a slice-of-life collage to many, but is actually more vacuous, technically and intellectual inept and stifling than anything the Hollywood system could ever produce. It is pure hatred and filth pretending to be art. It is idiocy masquerading as intellect. It is the product of a self-absorbed wannabe who somehow managed to get his hands on a camera and a contract with Fine Line Films. Avoid.
  
  

• It claws your senses, twists your logic, and murders your soul; and yet I can't look away.

  
  By A3KUUII2GSHN7T on 2007-05-22
  Another reviewer said Gummo was "unlike anything else of TV." My Holy Goodness, how right they were. If a lunatic was voted mayor of a town, Gummo would be the film depicting the townsfolk who call such a place "home-sweet-home."
  
  We are introduced to the following: two awkward, gangly teens who kill cats and sell the rotting corpses to a local grocery store for a dollar per pound; three sisters who are about as backwards as anything this side of Appalachian poverty; a seedy brother who pimps his retarded sister out to teenaged boys; a sinister-looking young lady who, obviously being on the slow side, enjoys walking around the town singing "Jesus loves me this I know" as well as the always depraved "A-B-C-D-EFG-" song. Along the way, we also meet a young man wearing nothing but some swim trunks and a pink bunny hat who has the habit of urinating on cars driving beneath a local underpass. Oh, and for fits and giggles, we meet a group of rowdy mullet-styled rednecks who get their kicks from wrestling kitchen chairs to the point of exhaustion.
  
  Sound like fun? This is a messed-up movie about twisted people living in the aftermath of a tornado that has swepth through their little slice of heaven. Nothing runs together smoothly as scenes and storylines come and go without rhyme or reason. Even the David Lynch and Terrence Malick crowds out there will feel disoriented in about 90% of this film.
  
  A word of caution: if you begin to watch Gummo, you will have trouble turning away. I would liken it to a drug addiction that you know will harm you in some if you keep using it, but you end up alleviating such a warning by telling yourself, "Hey, just a little more. Just a little bit mo...."
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Ed Wood, You Have Lost Your Worst Director Ever Title
  By AZKXH0J59TK11 on 2004-11-28
  I have seen a staggering number of bad films in my life. "Gigli", "Glitter", "Armeggedon", "Killing Zoe". Awful, tired pieces of filmmaking. But never in my life have I ever, or probably will ever, see a film as truly horrendous as "Gummo".
  In the English laungage, there are no words to properly say how truly awful this movie is. This is a movie made by dumb people who think they're smart for dumb people who think they're smart, point period.
  If you have never been subject to "Gummo" and are curious, as I once was, you may wonder to yourself: what's it all about? Well, is a word, nothing. "Gummo" is merely a bunch of scenes strung togather with little thought for continuity or story. This isn't "art", ladies and gentleman; this is contempt for one's audience.
  What you do get in these random scenes is things intended that are supposed to be disturbing, or even enlightening, but instead are so obvious and insipid that they are mind numbing. Marvel at two kids who beat cats to death, sell them to the local deli so they can go get spray cans to huff the fumes. Be intrigued by two albino girls jumping on a bed. Be shocked by a drunken man, played by the director, come onto a black midget. See drunken rednecks wrestle a set of chairs for the sheer reason of just doing it. Be offended by a man who sells sex with his retarded sister.
  Or rather, don't. There is absolutley nothing shocking, disturbing, enlightning or even interesting to be found in the ninty plus minutes of this "film". This a movie whose only point of even exisitng is so people who think they are into "art films" can think the people who do not enjoy this just aren't as smart as they are. These are the same people who think Goddard is the name of some French resturant.
  This movie is poorly paced, poorly shot, barely written and horribly acted. The charactors are never realistic, the tone, what little bit of a tone there is actully is, changes from scene to scene. There is junst nothing good about this movie.
  I have nothing but contempt for this movie. I don't like paying money to see something that believes that I'm an idiot because I'm not "down" or "cool" enough to think that this movie is nothign but a piece of garbage from frame one, a mistake, a waste of time, money, effort, film, lighting, everything that went into the making of it. Harmoney Korine is not an artist. From watching "Gummo". I believe he is a prankster. And the joke, matter of factly, is on all of us who wasted our lives prescious moments on this horrendous piece of garbage.
  The worst movie ever made. Without doubt.
  
  
• Pathetic- One of the worst
  By A2GANR9I6XHTU9 on 2005-02-17
  I just finished watching Gummo. What a mistake it was buying this piece of trash. Anyone who found this movie funny is disturbed. This isnt humorous at all and im into dark comedy. All it is is a bunch of sick depraved scenes rolled into one pile of trash while they are calling a movie. Its more like a documentary type film, if you want to even call it that. One of the other reviewers said ( get a sense of humor ). Heres some scenes from the movie and you be the judge as to if you have find these things humorous. A brother pimps his mentally disabled sister.- Killing and abusing cats. - The rest of the scenes i cannot even say on this site. This isnt a comedy. I have seen kids and was expecting somthing worse but i never expected this. There is absolutely no merit to this film whatsoever. It dosent even deserve a review. I am writing this review to warn you all not to purchase this movie. It will be a mistake and a waste of money.
  
  
• inspiring...the punk rock of movies
  By on 2000-04-07
  If you're adventurous in your movie watching you'll at least respect Gummo and you might even come out truly inspired. I've never seen a more original film. Godard, Bunuel, Peter Greenaway and a few others have probably done some things that were just as original but not more so. But that's not to say it's some dull art film that you have to research to understand. Far from it. Gummo is a punch in the face. It's about real people and real life. Kids do sniff glue and kill cats and rednecks do tear stuff up when they get wasted. They always have. I'm almost 30 and they certainly did in the 70s when I was a kid.

  Gummo takes realism to whole new level but it's not just a nihilistic rant. It's a sort of collage of rural, white lower-class survival. Of course it's not all pretty, and a lot of it maybe just a little too ugly for some, but there is beauty too. And I think the real beauty is that nobody's dreaming of a better life. People go around dreaming of a better life all day in Hollywood movies. In real life, most people try to make money so they can eat and have a little fun. They dream on the side.

  Gummo is the film American Beauty wished it could have been.
  
  

• Sick and plotless garbage
  By A17FLA8HQOFVIG on 2001-08-13
  The young director, Harmony Korine, who made his debut with the controversal movie "Kids" got even more wierd and sick with Gummo. There's not even a plot, just a loose collage of scenes which is supposedly a documentary about a fictional town in Tennessee that had experienced a tornado. The acting is mostly improvised by unknowns and many of the scenes are grusome. Teenagers kill stray cats and sell them to the local butcher and then go out and sniff glue. A retarded girl is prostituted by her brother. A drunken homosexual pass is made at a dwarf. Two young men have a real fight and beat each other bloody. Cruelty is everywhere and every scene is a shocker. The cinematography is often grainy and blurred and voices are muffled and unclear. I'm the curious type and so I wanted to see this video. I was prepared to be shocked. But I was also bored because the story just didn't go anyplace. I'm surprised it got any kind of distribution at all. For the barf bag crowd only.
  
  
• You'll never eat spaghetti again!
  By A3T0C9I6XHV1TD on 2001-03-14
  Harmony Korine has his detractors, but the world's better off with him in it. This is his directorial debut (he wrote KIDS which was directed by Larry Clark) and as you can tell if you watch it, he also wrote it and probably did all the casting of the real townies himself. "Gummo" doesn't have a plot, and the so-called story doesn't really flow in a conventional way. He's got a different sense of humor: rednecks beating the crap out of a chair (my favorite scene), a toe-less albino discussing what she looks for in a man, a kid lifting "weights" to Madonna while his mother tap-dances, deaf people arguing loudly in a bowling alley, the prostitute, the infamous bathtime gross-out scene (bacon? on the wall?), Harmony's cameo as a drunk gay boy pouring his heart out to a black midget, and many more lovely scenes. But it's not all funny. Some of it is quite disturbing and profound in a sick, sad way. It's not for the faint of heart or cat owners. One of my friends thought it was the stupidest movie he'd ever seen- then again, he thought "Shakespeare In Love" was a masterpiece. The technique he used in filming was great, and some of my favorite parts are either the still photos or the slow-motion segments. The soundtrack is also killer. "Gummo" stands alone, and proudly so. You'll never see anything quite like it. PS: you'll love the outfits the characters wear, Chloe herself picked them out!
  
  
• Nonsense for People Who Need to Be Told What to Think
  By A3DE1IYJGU5HPW on 2002-06-17
  ..."Gummo" has no plot; it's a series of vignettes about "life" in Ohio that (kind of) come together. There's all the stuff that's "commonplace" in the Buckeye State: rape, incest, cat torture, drug use, you name it, it's there. There's not much else to say about the movie; one could extol its virtues, but then one could extol the virtues of early Stalinist propaganda, or "Die Eternische Juden" as well. Extol all you want, it doesn't change the underlying ignorance and bias inherent in those films - or this one.

  That being said, "Gummo" is exactly the kind of bigoted [garbage] that people think small towns are like - specifically, people who have never been to small towns, or the only time they spent in small towns was driving through (or watching "Deliverance")."Gummo" was even filmed in Tennessee, using extras from Tennessee - they couldn't get the location right, and Korine's so-called experiment" by using "real Ohio people" is as false as Miss Cleo's fortune telling.

  In other words, it's not reality. It's a made-up bourgeoisie Candyland created by pseudo-intellectuals who like to turn their nose up at the very people they supposedly want to drag out of corporate oppression. If you REALLY want to learn about small-town Ohio life, go visit Ohio. I can suggest some very nice bed and breakfasts, and central Ohio is wonderful in the autumn. If you REALLY want to depress yourself with someone's invented fantasy and use your dollars to support ignorance, by all means, buy or rent "Gummo". It's your call.

  Final Grade: F
  
  

• Don't love it, don't hate it
  By A1GR9B5TLYZ7SG on 2000-08-21
  I had heard a few things about the movie "Gummo" in the past: "really gross", "disturbing", "f#*$ed up", etc., and I guess I feel the same way, but the film holds a certain allure that can only be compared to looking at an accident scene: you don't want to look, but you do anyway. Aside from the killing of cats, retarded prostitutes, and wrestling of chairs (yes, that's in it), perhaps the most disturbing part of the film is that it's hard to tell who's acting, and who's not. The film plays like a documentary, and it gives the film a realistic feel that's really creepy. For instance, the scene in which the two ex-Jehovah's Witness brothers beat the living crap out of each other looks absolutely real. These guys are really hitting each other as hard as they can--no camera tricks can simulate this. The scene in which the kid with the weird head, Solomon, is sitting in his filthy black-water bathtub eating spaghetti and then drops his chocolate bar in the water, fishes it out and eats it, made me want to puke. This film will definitely make an interesting addition to your collection, but it's not something to watch for fun.
  
  
• Oh the humanity!
  By A2V3P1XE33NYC3 on 2004-09-27
  While I am no stranger to supposedly "art house" films, my experience with Harmony Korine's 1997 film "Gummo" made me question whether movies that fall under that rubric are worth the effort. Pretentious, inane, disgusting, and ultimately confusing in the extreme--"Gummo" embodies all of these traits and more. I don't think you can even call this a film, really, since there is no plot structure to speak of, little in the way of coherent dialogue, and no attempt to establish well developed characters. On second thought, these three problems describe most of the low budget junk I spend my days and nights watching, so perhaps Korine's effort is a film in some sense of the word. It was shot on film, for example. According to the blurbs on the DVD case, Harmony Korine was the chap responsible for writing the epochal "Kids," another gloom and doom filled film that taxes viewers' patience. I suspect this is the sort of movie you will either hate or dislike immensely; some people claim to love it, amazingly, although I am suspicious of their assertions because they never seem to say anything substantive to back up their supposed infatuation.
  
  What you have in "Gummo" is a place (Xenia, Ohio), several white trash personalities, an African-American "little person," Harmony Korine himself, dead cats, glue sniffing, illicit use of duct tape, and a bunch of other nonsensical themes and people stuffed together in a series of disjointed scenes. Korine tries to draw some sort of comparison between what he shows us and a killer tornado that wiped out the town back in the 1970s, but it doesn't make any sense. The film opens with some kid wearing pink bunny ears (Jacob Sewell) ambling around on a highway overpass. Then we eventually meet two brain dead yucks, Tummler (Nick Sutton) and the wispy haired, repulsive looking Solomon (Jacob Reynolds), who spend their days biking around town to the dulcet strains of heavy metal music. These two kids take their BB guns and shoot cats, sell them to the local butcher (!), and then use the proceeds to huff glue. Oh yeah--they also engage in some of the most uninspiring, insipid dialogue ever captured on film. Just in case you get bored with these two, we occasionally shift focus to Dot (indie movie queen Chloe Sevigny) and a couple of her bleach blonde compatriots. These girls jump around on a bed, experiment with duct tape, and stumble around town.
  
  For some inexplicable reason, I continued to watch the film. More inanities unfolded, including a house full of drunken parolees smashing metal chairs, the whole issue with the old lady on a respirator, a girl with Down's Syndrome running back and forth, and Solomon's filthy experience in the bathtub replete with spaghetti dinner and chocolate bar for dessert. You even get to see Solomon working out in front of a mirror while he converses with his wacky mother. The movie begins as it ends, i.e. not making a whit of sense. Throughout the entire film I searched for meaning in the random jumble of images, confident that at some point Korine would reveal what he's really trying to say with "Gummo." Perhaps something about the plight of the rural poor in America? The mindless existence of lives spent in endless cycles of poverty? How environment coupled with a life shattering natural disaster can permanently damage the human spirit? Hey, I got it! This is a stream of consciousness film where we the viewer project our own interpretations onto the images! Yeah, right. Any of the above messages would have worked in a pinch if only Harmony Korine actually had an interest in saying anything of interest. He doesn't, "Gummo" doesn't, and we the viewer suffer as a result. There is nothing here beyond what you see, no depth beyond surface impressions.
  
  I'm not going to waste anymore time talking about this atrocity. Watch it if you must, if you feel you have to explore the furthest reaches of banal cinema, but don't expect an epiphany. Trite dialogue, trite characters, and a plodding pace make "Gummo" the feel bad hit of the last ten years. If you care, the extras on the disc include a short commentary/interview with a rambling, incoherent Korine that sheds absolutely no light on the film. I would have been interested in discovering the origins of the film, why Korine thought this was a good idea. My guess? He ingested to many paint chips as a child. Don't say you weren't warned.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• gummo.......
  By A2G4HD2GFUHBE6 on 2001-04-20
  ok, i could be waaaay off the mark with my interpretation of this film, but i think the point was to show how messed up this world can be. it also could be about a hatred for white trash rednecks with no real purpose except to kill innocent cats and sell them to get money to have sex with their friend's mentally-retarded sister. this movie is really messed up in my opinion. i personally was pretty shocked, and i still don't know for sure what the point of this movie was. the purpose of this movie may (doubtfully) be trying to glorify the trailer park life, and the hatred of cats for all i know!

  i would highly recommend not seeing this movie if you are a cat lover (like myself), because there are many sad scenes involving cat killing, and whatnot. although it looks fake, the thought of this behavior made me twitch and my stomach a little queezy.

  i can't honestly say if i liked this movie or not! i did like the movie kids a lot, and i would probably compare gummo to that. i did like the camera work, and the actors were all very convincing (because most aren't even actors!).

  the film has almost no plot, but it shows many people living in a small "trailer trash" town that was pretty well destroyed by a tornado. this movie is really tragic, and bizarre! i can't even describe it very well, but it does seem to be a movie to shock you, as kids did.

  the main things i took away from this film may be totally different from what others did. well, see it for yourself, i didn't find it funny but you may.
  
  

• A Kaleidoscope of The Grotesque
  By A1Q0AQ2HVNSYYW on 2000-08-13
  Cats. Dead Cats. Prostitutes. Prostitutes with Down's syndrome. Spaghetti. Spaghetti with blood red sauce. Water. Brown, muddy and infested water. An observant Pigeon chested delinquent. An observant Pigeon chested delinquent sitting in a filthy bath tub, in brown water, eating his loving mother's blood red spaghetti after a day of murdering cats and having sex with a prostitute with down's syndrome.

  Yes, but where do the bleached sisters, the sexually confused dwarf, the four letter word spouting 6 years olds, the single and looking albino and the foul smelling brain dead grandmother of yet another cat murdering transvestite come in. Well all over the place really.

  As a surreal inquiry into the traditions of rural America, Gummo should be taken with a jar of salt. The film is disgusted with its characters, pulls them from under their rocks to present them to us. Gummo is an articulate exploitation film by gifted visual stylist. Writer/Director Harmony Korine gives us alarmingly arresting scenes, almost all are grotesque, some are oddly affecting(the scenes of the pigeon chested boy lifting weights while his adoring mother tap dances around him is an example). Had Korine been able to achieve such an incendiary disquiting effect without resorting to cruelty(the retarded prostitute pimped by her husband is mindlessly ugly), his film would have been hailed as a masterpiece.

  It is relatively easy to elicit an emotional response using shock tactics. Harder to move them through a conflict of character, loneliness and yearning. I don't regret sitting through Gummo because I know I will seldom encounter such a deliberatly uncommercial film. It is clear that Korine is talented. So talented that he managed to convince many that Gummo is something other then what it actualy is. A freak show. Which is not neccesarily a bad thing, certainly not a boring one.
  
  

• The most brilliant and profound film since Saving Silverman.
  By A13M31KVYVZ7M8 on 2003-04-08
  Relationship Rule #57: When your girlfriend asks you to go to the video store to rent Casablanca, and said film is not available, do not assume that Gummo is an acceptable alternative. Trust me.
  
  
• Strange, But Interesting Movie
  By A30IZT5ZEFAUG8 on 2004-06-13
  If you have seen the movie - KIDS than you are familiar with Harmony Korine's work. (This was also the movie playing in DMX's house at the very beginning of the movie BELLY.)

  Like KIDS, this movies follows the lives of some stange and unusual people. In this film the movie follows the residents of a southern community that was almost destroyed by a tornado.

  However, even though I liked the movie to be honest there was no clearly defined story line or plot and many may find the movie disturbing. (Like the kids selling cats that they kill to a butcher, or the retarded prostitute.)

  But I found the movie interesting. Maybe it is b/c I live in the South and can imagine some of these characters living in these types of places.

  But like I said, watch at your own risk.
  Most likely you won't like it.
  
  

• What pure trash.
  By A97NMZOAXJZAD on 2005-02-28
  Having lived in Xenia Ohio for several years now, I can tell you this peice of crap is completely false. Beleive it or not, there are people out there who think this is 'based on a true story' and that Xenia Ohio is really like this. The only thing 'true', is that we have had 2 tornados in the past 25 years, one of which in 1974 destroyed most of the town. Not in the '1990s' like the film potrays. This is not some racist white trash breeding ground, in fact a good portion of our population is of African orgin. I wouldnt care about this waste except that we know have vistors dumb enough to look around for the false landmarks in the movie.
  
  Aside from my obvious bias, the movie is a bore. There is no plot, and the film relies on shock value like the usual reality-show world BS that is popular now.
  
  
• Is this too much reality for you, folks?
  By A3C6CZC2JP67VK on 2007-12-03
  Well, what can I say, director Korine seem to want to challenge the audience to find the justification for his debut film. Following by his screenplay, "Kids", which he wrote at 19, further carves out his relevance in today's cinema as one weird director. This movie without a story or seemingly without a script can form many reactions. Korine follows various characters in a backwoods town at Xenia, Ohio which was once nearly devastated by a tornado. The lives followed here include mostly adolescents and centers on two boys, Tummler (Nick Sutton) and Solomon (Jacob Reynolds). Solomon's father was killed during the Xenia tornadoes...and the film follows these boys on various destructive and self-destructive exploits that defy any cinematic validity. This is not film in most ways, it is real life. This "real life" includes glue sniffing, riding dirt bikes, sex and watching such challenging scenes as a man pimping his mentally ill wife who spends her days bedridden and dolled up like a 2-dollar hooker. At the same time we also meet two sisters, Dot (Chloë Sevigny) and Helen (Carisa Glucksman), who want to become stripper's .Then there is also a boy (Jacob Sewell) who wanders around town wearing pink bunny ears.
  
  Korine constructed his movie as a series of vignettes depicting these characters and various others engaged in disruptive behavior. The episodes range from funny and beautiful to gratuitous and senseless. I found the cinematography of "Gummo" stark, depressing but oddly hypnotic. It's really the way that the director filmed it (scratchy montage, digital low-quality shootings), and the conversations between the two boys that make the movie compelling and fascinating to watch. I found the performances, including that of Chloe Sevigny to be honest, authentic and sad.
  
  The movie is filmed like the lives of all the people in the village. There's no real development, people don't really do much to improve their situation, and it's a secluded world they live in. The weird southern-style music and the many unexplained characters like the pink-bunny boy make it a surreal experience. The most memorable scene: was Solomon bath scene.....tell me just how disgusting can a bath be and on top of that while eating dinner?!?
  
  It would be nice to think that, if they do exist, at least we shouldn't have to look at them... This movie is, indeed, a more gritty and honest version of "Slacker". They make a good double feature. Of course, after seeing "Gummo", you will see the cast of "Slackers" Many viewers have despised this film and it's good that people are offended. Maybe it just means that the movie accomplished its goal.
  
  
  
• Zappa's ideals live on as proved by Korine!
  By A85JDOAKC9OKO on 2000-06-27
  I am yet another supposed anti-conformist that tried to see something removed from the mediocre mainstream only to land in a pit in Ohio that is even worse. This movie is truly pretentious. Korine has barely any talent in the skill of screenwriting. (I can safely say this even though I don't know the first thing about writing). That whole scene with the dying grandmother has some of the lamest dialog I've ever heard. I actually grasped my head in pain as Korine tried to put some human emotion into this cinematic event synonymous with napalm. Sure, it's got some bizarre images (surprisingly few, actually) and semi-humorous character acting, but what's Korine trying to tell us? That the redneck youth population is sick and cynical...wow...that's a surprise! What a profound statement! (It's almost the same exact theme explored in the barely-superior, "Kids"). For the people that felt "new, heightened emotions", well, obviously, you were watching a different movie. Yeah...I was real moved by the scene of a sexually-confused dwarf arm-wrestling with insane hillbillys...it was like Jesus came down to heal me with that scene. This "film" is like "Happiness" (far better) w/o any kind of redeeming statement. It is purely intended to shock (which it doesn't really do anyway) and by giving it five stars you are decieving yourself and other indie fans...Better indie movies exist for you to gather around...From Bufallo '66 to Celebration to Aguirre to Korine's only good film, Julien Donkey-Boy there are way better movies to stick up for than this horrible, terrible, mindless insanity provided by this movie. Hey...if you want trippy images, watch Brazil or Cremaster! (I graciously granted it one extra star purely for that accordian rabbit in the bathroom)
  
  
• This is not a movie. It is art.
  By A2AW6RUVJEP4NG on 2001-01-27
  Leonard Maltin hates this movie. I bet George W. Bush would hate this movie too. And a lot of other conservative people with no taste would hate it also. This is art, doofuses. 'Cast Away' is not art. It is a Fed Ex commercial with a Wilson tie-in. 'Traffic' is not art. It is a dilettante being given millions of dollars to do an unprovocative, ultra-conservative music video on the drug war because Hollywood is wondering where the Scorsese of today's generation is. So, if you like movies, go watch Bird On A Wire. If you like to get your head blown off by actual art, rent this movie. It's not "an edge-of-your-seat thrill-ride that never lets go!" (NoBrain McPaid, KCBS - Fresno). Amen to that.
  
  
• Quite Possibly the Worst Film I Have Ever Seen
  By on 2002-07-14
  I'm not going to tell you not to see this movie, because everyone should see it, if only because it simply must be seen to be believed. It is very possibly the worst film I have ever seen in my life. This movie severely disturbed me--not necessarily because of its grotesque images, but because they were empty, because the film's sole purpose is to sicken. Apparently there are moments meant to be taken as funny, but the few times I laughed don't make up for the sleepness nights that I experienced afterward, so horrified was I by what I had seen. Sick can be funny, but very rarely is sadism--and it takes a more talented filmmaker than Harmony Korine to make sadism funny.

  The film is nothing more than a series of horrifying episodes. There are numerous scenes of boys capturing, killing, torturing and mutilating cats from their neighborhood, and then selling the bodies to a resteraunteur. Boys visit a prostitute with Down's syndrome who is being pimped out by her own husband. A mother threatens to shoot her son in the head because he won't smile. Teenage girls put duct tape on their nipples, make out with boys in their pool during a rainstorm, and are almost molested by a man who helps them look for their lost cat (no points for guessing what happened to it). A little girl describes her father molesting her. Whole families get high together. Deaf people are openly mocked.

  And, in the film's most nauseating (but not necessarily most disturbing) scene, a little boy is bathed by his mother while eating spaghetti and gulping chocolate milk (when his candy bar falls into the murky brown bathwater, he fishes it out and continues eating it). Words cannot express how disgusting this is to watch--you have to see it for yourself to understand.

  The only even remotely funny scenes in the film include (1) an albino waitress dancing hysterically to music from her car radio and expressing her love of Patrick Swayze, and (2) a sequence in which a kitchen full of rednecks beat each other with chairs that is so endlessly long that, eventually, laughter is the only method of relief.

  I am an openminded film-viewer. I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about cinema--and I can understand why some critics have compared GUMMO to the work of many celebrated film directors like Fellini, whose AMARCORD is a similarly unstructured, episodic film about life in a small Italian town. Both films are surreal and sometimes disgusting, but AMARCORD is also poetic, meaningful, and entertaining (in other words, worlds away from GUMMO). Some have said that GUMMO is comparable to the films of Fellini or Werner Herzog. I fail to see the connection.

  See GUMMO at your own risk--I found it the most reprehensible viewing experience I have had in many, many years.
  
  

• A Shocking Vision of America
  By AC6NHR77HTISB on 2004-06-19
  Most tattoo artists I know say they are inundated with customers requesting to have American flags etched permanently into their bodies. I only wonder if any of these patriots have seen the movie, Gummo, a disturbing portrayal by filmmaker Harmony Korine of life in one small American town that they might not be so proud of. The film begins with a shot of Xenia Ohio, and a voiceover of a child's deadpan description. "A few years ago a tornado hit this place. It killed people left and right ... Houses were split open and you could see necklaces hanging from branches of trees ... I saw a girl fly through the sky and I looked up her skirt." These few sentences suggest the tragedy, mystery, and humor that surge through this film. However, most fans of your typical Hollywood flicks with explosive action and character developments may not be able to appreciate these features of Gummo. The movie has no plot, just a series of situations, no big screen stars, just small-time and even amateur actors. The characters they play simply exist on the screen without growing or changing. Most of them are lower-class white children of the type we rarely see outside the realm of trashy daytime talk shows. In fact, Korine actually tracked down Nick Sutton to play Tummler after he saw him on an episode of "The Sally Jesse Raphael Show" called "My Child Died from Sniffing Paint." When Sutton, who's a paint-sniffing survivor, was asked where he thought he'd be in a few years he replied simply, "I'll probably be dead." It was at that moment Korine claims to have fallen in love with the boy's image.
  In the movie, Tummler is one of two boys who cruise through Xenia on BMX, looking for stray cats to kill and then sell to the local butcher. The other boy, whose odd-looking face and underdeveloped body made him the promotional poster boy for Gummo, is Solomon. Other characters include the local pimp whose only prostitute is an attention-starved mentally-challenged woman, a couple of local teenage girls with bleached out blond hair who spend their time doting on their youngest sister while trying to make their nipples larger, and Bunny Boy, who doesn't speak at all during the movie but haunts many scenes as he passes by donning little else but a hood of long bunny ears.
  One gets the feeling that none of these people has ever left Xenia, a place of grimy poverty, casual cruelty, and the type of boredom that gives way to drunken parties where men arm wrestle and in a make-shift ring pit themselves one by one against a kitchen chair. Although this film will likely disturb and disgust most viewers, it is a chance to see one man's unique cinema graphic vision-a dreamy yet poignant art project that is not meant to be defined but reacted to. Gummo is an electrifying succession of startling, strange, and tender images. Whether or not moviegoers can claim they were enthralled or they walked out halfway through-two perfectly legitimate responses-it is nevertheless a type of poetry on the screen.
  Towards the end of Gummo there is a scene where Solomon's mother is simultaneously giving him a bath and feeding him a spaghetti dinner. For dessert, after his hair is washed, he receives a candy bar that he accidentally drops into the brown bath water and then, completely unphased, eats. There is barely any dialogue in this sequence, no background music, and if you look close enough you can see a piece of fried bacon stuck to the wall behind him with Scotch tape. This is Harmony Korine's idea of entertainment, bizarre images that stick with you long after the movie has ended.
  At one point, Solomon's mother joins him in the basement while he is lifting weights-really handfuls of silverware bundled together-in front of a huge mirror. We watch his puny reflection, his deadpan determination. There is a hint of tenderness in his mother's eyes as she looks at him, a hint of pain as she puts on her dead husband's tap dancing shoes and begins to flop ridiculously around in them. Also when she picks up a handgun, jokingly holds it to her child's head and tells him to smile, there is a hint of something else, though it is difficult to determine exactly what it is. For sure, however, it is something entirely unique to Korine, a different brand of humor or tragedy or irony or beauty or perhaps none and all of the above. Scenes like this seem just to happen naturally in Gummo, and Korine, with the eye of an artist and the help of cinematographer, Jean-Yves Escoffier, shows them to us without judging or condescending to any of the characters involved.
  The idea that places like Xenia actually exist in our country won't sit well with many people, yet Korine seems to want to play this lifelike texture up with grainy cuts from "home videos" of tornadoes and real people doing absurd standup routines for the camera. And while Gummo is confined to life in this one small impoverished American town, the soundtrack canvasses almost all aspects of American culture, ranging from Hoosier Hotshots to Madonna to Almedo Riddle singing the children's song, "My Little Rooster," to the death metal sounds of "Sleep," to Roy Orbison.
  Ultimately, whether its lurid images of life are upsetting to viewers or not, Xenia is undoubtedly one pocket of American culture that should not be ignored. Neither should Harmony Korine's vision; and one must not forget that Gummo is, in essence, a visual experience. Without a storyline or any character development there's little else to go on anyway. However, the subtlety of each camera shot, the way each scene can be shockingly real, over-the-top, dream-like, touching, cruel, funny, and beautiful all at the same time makes for one bizarre film that's not to be missed.
  
  
• I hate this movie
  By A2CTMZF54USTEY on 2001-09-26
  I had heard about this movie from a friend, who hadn't seen it, but knew that Harmony Kline had written it, and directed it. We had both seen Kids, and thought it was great. Unfortunately, every video store i went to didn't have it. However, I did find it for sale in the mall. So i bought it, and told my friend that I bought it. So we watched it. After about two hours of the worst assault on my intellect, my friend and I went to the bar and drank ourselves silly in futile effort to forget why I wasted my money on this. This movie has absolutely no point. There was no story, or train of thought. Just PWT kids practicing to be PWT adults. I would hope that this would be insulting to the PWT population. Some have argued that this was art. I would simply tell those people that art should invoke some kind thought or emotion, and at least, make you wonder why you feel the way you do. I didn't have to think about why I felt mad, it's because i threw away money on this garbage. Now I'm one that believes that people should do and try different things, but this is the exception. Please don't buy this movie.
  
  
• You never lived there
  By on 2003-07-03
  I love these reviewers who -- almost in the same breath -- express how disgusted they are by the folks portrayed in Gummo, and their outrage at Korine for "exploiting" them. I've no doubt some people appreciate this movie only as a freakshow. Can't be helped. But I watched it more with a sense of familiarity than shock. I knew these people. I still get calls from these people. Some of them I still call back. No, I didn't grow up in Korine's Xenia, but I have fond memories of places much like it.

  People compare this movie to Jerry Springer. Springer doesn't make me homesick.

  For all their talk of exploitation, most reveiwers could've summed up their response in a single line: "I DON'T WANT TO LOOK AT THESE PEOPLE." Paul Tatara would never step into my old neighborhood for fear of accidentally making eye contact with guys like the ones I used to get drunk with.

  Screw you, Paul. And double for Elspeth Haughton.
  
  

• Absolutely worthless trash and the worst film I've ever seen
  By AFMWLT45X9H4R on 2001-11-22
  I never thought anything could top such horrible "films" as Wired or Where the Buffalo Roam, but this one leaves them all in the dust and then some. As I sat through pointless scene after scene, I kept wondering why I was wasting my time and I contemplated nearly 200 times pressing stop on the remote and hoping it was all a nightmare that I could awake from. I was tossing and turning uncontrollably so I figured that might be the reason. Alas, I pinched myself and discovered it was a nightmare of another sort.

  Although I've seen hundreds of movies in the theater, I have never walked out on one. I knew that had I seen this one in the theater that it would have been the first. I've had dental work that was more enjoyable than this... There is absolutely no reason for one second of this to have ever been made. If the director (for lack of a better term) Harmony Korine had filmed this as home movies and never showed them to anyone else, then it would be no big deal. Instead, he chose to make the world a much worse place by contaminating all of us who've seen it.

  What are the worthwhile scenes here? Is it the eyebrowless females placing tape over their breasts? Is it the two characters who spend their day finding and killing cats to sell to a local food merchant? How about the kid in the bunny costume who allows two foul-mouthed adolescents to stand over him with cap guns while he plays dead (this scene went on and on and on and on--at this point I began counting tiles on my ceiling as that was far more entertaining). The truth is there isn't one entertaining or socially redeeming thing about the entire "movie".

  ...I couldn't care less if a movie is pure Hollywood or an independent film on a shoestring budget, good is good and bad is bad. The fact that Gummo was a low budget indie film with unknowns doesn't make it a good movie. Nor does the presence of a big budget, star power, and expensive advertising make a movie good. Hook and Batman and Robin both come to mind.

  ...Believe me, I got it. When I see a worthless waste of my time, I get it. Bottom line: avoid this garbage and do something more worthy of your time, like rearranging your sock drawer or cleaning the lint trap on the dryer. Both will be more entertaining than Gummo.
  
  

• hmmmmmmm
  By A7LO6S8PJDWW4 on 2004-10-14
  i did not like gummo
  it was a little bit inbred
  i like willy wonka
  gummo is strange
  unlike willy wonka
  which makes perfect sense
  
  
• Worst Movie
  By A2OIHZBH6A3RX7 on 2005-06-14
  I went to the movie rental store and we always saw this movie, we laughed about it because it looks so stupid. We finally rented it and laughed so hard. It's the worst movie you could ever rent, everyones depressed in the film and it has no plot. We laughed at how stupid it was, i would never watch this again and I wanna beat the director of this movie up. He's horrible and hes pretty sick, i listened to the commentary. He should just kill himself or have someone else kill him. i would
  
  
• A Failure
  By A3F2DHG5KIZRSV on 2005-06-14
  The problem with Gummo is that there is no motivation in any of the film. Characters move from one disturbing scene into another directionless and lost. The whole dead cat thing is moronic and obvious. Bunny Boy is token as if the director is saying "Wow check it out--I've got a character who serves no purpose! Is'nt that cool!" Likewise taking a bath in dirty water is also pointless even for a film with arthouse aspirations. On the flipside the casting of a bunch of no names does lend to some realism no matter how forced it actaully is and the fact that there is no real plot isn't actually it's undoing--like a bad accident the director seems to want us to watch just because it's so insepid. In the right hands this may have worked.
  
  
• Mind-numbingly awful, pointless, and pretentious
  By on 2002-01-11
  This is honestly, without a doubt, the worst movie I have ever seen. What really irritated me about this movie is not that it is disturbing. "Schindler's List" and "Breaking the Waves" are disturbing but they are great works of art. Their sole purpose is not to shock but to tell their story. Gummo, however, had no point or purpose. Each scene continues on...and on....and on. It's only goal was to gross out the audience. Well I'm sorry, but that is not enough to merit a movie, period. Furthermore, a movie should not just show one side of things. There was no hint of beauty in this town, no glimmer of hope that these characters could lean on. And on that note, the directors need to work on their accuracy. I know someone who comes from that town and she is quite educated and well-off. She is not the exception. At the same time, I know people who are poor and they do not kill cats, have sex with retarded girls, and abuse their children. The problem with this movie is that they attribute all these negative qualities to the poor, when in reality, there is racism, prostitution, and abuse in every sector of society.
  I agree with someone who made the comment that independent films do not always equal quality. There is a pretentious idea now that the lower the budget, the more artful the product. Give me a break. This movie is so bad it was actually painful to watch. The acting was uninspired, the narration mumbled, and each scene utterly pointless. Rent this to see the worst movie ever-no joke. But please don't buy it.
  
  

• Kids
• Julien Donkey-Boy
• Bully
• Happiness
• Spun (Unrated Version)