Rating: /5
Cult Movie Challenge 2016 | 29/52 | Found Footage
CW // Defecation, Sex, Misogyny, Homophobia, Racism, Blood, Murder
Jean Delmann for the Tim & Eric generation
People in masks hump things and other shenanigans.
The film was shot on video to recreate a found footage aesthetic, complete with scan lines, auto tracking, and in-camera titles.
Initially, I found myself laughing without having an obvious reason. It isn’t quite a discomfort — maybe I enjoy uncanny absurdity.
But when it tries to descend into something darker, it betrays its intentions. Harmony Korine didn’t have confidence in his idea, so he added murder, which is far less disturbing than the scene where they tell a child how to hide a razor blade in an apple.
Similarly, he originally wanted to leave VHS tapes around so that they became authentic found footage. But he abandoned that and went for traditional distribution.
Korine wanted something that felt like a bit of magic in ordinary life, but its artifice was too prevalent. This isn’t Diane Arbus — this is pretending.
That doesn’t mean the film is an outright failure — I appreciate some of the weirdness on display and the degraded Americana. But its insistence that it is being transgressive doesn’t land, especially now 15 years after its release.