Barnes & Noble

Shot outside of Nashville but set in Ohio, Gummo marks the ragged, arresting feature film debut of then-22-year-old Kids writer Harmony Korine. Starting with underage kids cursing in a singsong voice-over, a bobbling camera follows a shirtless boy with bunny ears, when suddenly the soundtrack changes into a yodeled folk song about a rooster. Though non-narrative, the moment-to-moment shocks create a somewhat fascinating, noisy rhythm. One scene of a teenage boy speculating about his girlfriend's breast lump slides into one of a twentysomething nothing (Max Perlich) pimping his sister, a young girl who clearly has Down syndrome. The extreme nature of the subject matter -- which runs the graphic gamut from dwarf sex to glue sniffing to cat assassinating -- polarized the film's public and critical reception. Gus van Sant envied the movie, provoking New York Times stalwart Janet Maslin to respond with a shopworn "worst of the year" tag. The fact is that Gummo dares to film characters in the moral vacuum where a great many Americans make their home. This peculiar, paradoxical brand of invective was also heaped on innovators like Werner Herzog (who, admiring Korine, starred in his next feature, Julien Donkey-Boy), Luis Buñuel, and John Waters, as well as films like Freaks. At the very least, Korine knows which buttons to press, bringing it all off in a fashion not dissimilar to the old, weird folk tunes that grace his grime. Gummo shows this young man as a sly, overcompensating, but never uninteresting lenser of low-rent anti-Americana.

All Movie Guide

In this elliptical ensemble piece, which marks the directorial debut of indie bad boy Harmony Korine, the teens of tornado-scarred Xenia, OH, kill cats, tape their boobies, arm-wrestle, bathe, cross-dress, huff glue, avoid perverts, pay to have sex with retarded girls, lift makeshift dumbbells to the strains of Madonna's "Like a Prayer," fight, cuss, shave their eyebrows, undergo cancer treatment, euthanize senior citizens, and pee on passing cars. A hallucinatory barrage of images and scenarios with little in the way of traditional plot, Gummo has been variously described as a surrealist joke, a visual poem, and a worm's-eye view of white-trash suffering. The main characters include Solomon (Jacob Reynolds), who sells cat carcasses to a middleman who procures them for use at a local Chinese restaurant; his mother (Linda Manz), who teaches him to tap dance while reminiscing about her dead husband; Tummler (Nick Sutton), a mullet-haired local sex symbol; a midget (Bryant L. Crenshaw); a pair of boy-crazy, bleach-blond sisters named Dot (Chloe Sevigny) and Helen (Carisa Bara); a slut with a lump in her breast (Lara Tosh); a group of drunken louts; and Bunny Boy (Jacob Sewell), who wanders the town enigmatically in a pair of long pink ears. In between scenes of these characters enacting their bizarre routines, Korine intersperses impressionistic and quasi-documentary scenes with voice-over narration that ranges from incest memoirs to arty dialogue along the lines of "He's got what it takes to be a legend: He's got a marvelous persona." Shot just outside Nashville, TN, Gummo includes costume designs by Korine's then-girlfriend, Chloe Sevigny, who also plays Dot and who previously starred in the Korine-scipted, Larry Clark-directed Kids. Jacob Reynolds would go on to appear in Getting to Know You, though few of the director's other discoveries have appeared on film since. Brian J. Dillard

Product Details

• UPC: 794043523625
• Source: NEW LINE HOME VIDEO
• Region Code: 1
• Aspect Ratio: Theatre Wide-Screen (1.85.1)
• Presentation: Wide Screen
• Sound: stereo
• Language: English
• Subtitles: English
• Time: 1:35:00
• Sales Rank: 25,661

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