Gummo (1997)

6.9	Listal rating
6.2	IMDB rating

Directed by

Harmony Korine

Starring (View all)

Bunny Boy

Tummler

Girl in Car

Solomon

Darby

Dot

Helen

Jason Guzak

Skinhead #1

Written by

Harmony Korine

(written by)

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Gummo - Dead Rabbit (quality)

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Review

1 year, 6 months ago at Nov 6 9:12

Hang Diem

1 vote

Problematic, troubling, dangerous even, but breathtakingly original, and absolutely true to the times. The cutting edge doesn't get any sharper than this.

Review

1 year, 1 month ago at Apr 11 17:22

m08221196

1 vote

Lots of films get described as "fucked up", but very few have actually lived up to that description. You have exploitation garbage like "Cannibal Holocaust" and "The Human Centipede", exploitation garbage disguising itself as something more like "Black Swan", "Requiem for a Dream", and "Audition", and then you have your "Salos" which are basically just porn. But "Gummo" is a film that I can truly ... read more

Review

3 years, 8 months ago at Sep 8 19:31

Factory Girl

1 vote

I believe this movie is one of those you can rate as rubbish,a pointless rubbish,because if it had any point at all I wouldn't be completely sorry for losing my 1.30 watching it!It follows a story of a place in Ohio where all the inhabitants are weird,sick,twisted and all these qualities come from their poorness,bad life conditions and bad environment.I really don't know if this was supposed to be... read more

View all Gummo reviews (2 more)

Description: Gummo is a 1997 American independent drama written and directed by Harmony Korine. A directorial debut for Korine, the film stars Jacob Reynolds, Jacob Sewell and Chloe Sevigny. Rather than following a linear plot, the film is a series of seemingly unrelated vignettes depicting the hopeless, nihilistic lives of the residents of Xenia, Gummo is a 1997 American independent drama written and directed by Harmony Korine. A directorial debut for Korine, the film stars Jacob Reynolds, Jacob Sewell and Chloe Sevigny. Rather than following a linear plot, the film is a series of seemingly unrelated vignettes depicting the hopeless, nihilistic lives of the residents of Xenia, Ohio, a small Midwestern town that had been previously struck by a devastating tornado. The plot itself focuses on the impoverished people who dwell in the tornado's aftermath; however, it features no significant interconnection between each character and scene.
Produced on a modest budget of $1 million, Gummo was not given a large theatrical release and hence failed to generate large box office revenues, being an independent film. However, the film did generate substantial press for its graphic content and highly original, stylised narrative. Since its initial theatrical release Gummo has since been labelled as a cult film.
The film is set in Xenia, Ohio, a small town hit by a tornado in 1974, although it was filmed in Nashville, Tennessee. The film portrays Xenia as the home of various oddball and somewhat disturbing backwater characters. The loose narrative follows several main characters who find odd and destructive ways to pass time, interrupted by vignettes depicting other denizens of the town.
The film opens with a grainy voiced narrator recounting the events of the tornado while disturbing home-movie images play — mostly of the town's people. Following the narration, the credits roll over a montage of an adolescent boy, known as Bunny Boy, wearing only pink bunny ears, shorts and tennis shoes on an overpass in the rain.
The next scene opens with a cat being carried by the scruff of its neck by a teenage boy. He drowns the cat in a barrel of water. The film then cuts to a different scene with the same boy Tummler, in a wrecked car with a girl. They fondle each other, and Tummler realizes there is a lump in one of the girl's breasts.
Tummler and Solomon then ride down a hill on bikes. The narrator introduces Tummler as a boy with "a marvelous persona", whom some people call "downright evil". Later, Tummler aims an air rifle at a cat. His friend Solomon stops him from killing the cat, protesting that it is a house cat. They leave and the camera follows the cat to its owners' house. The cat is owned by three sisters, two of whom are teenagers and one who is pre-pubescent.
The film cuts back to Tummler and Solomon, who are hunting feral cats. They bring the cats to a local grocer, who intends to butcher and sell them to a local restaurant, and the grocer tells them that they have a rival in the cat killing business. They then buy glue from the grocer, which they use to get high via huffing.
The film then cuts to a scene in which two young boys dressed as cowboys curse and destroy things in a junkyard. Bunny Boy arrives and the other boys shoot him "dead" with cap guns. Bunny Boy plays dead and the boys curse at him, rifle through his pockets, then remove and throw one of his shoes. They grow bored of this and leave him sprawled on the ground.
Tummler and Solomon track down a local boy who is poaching "their" cats. The poacher, named Jarrod Wiggley is poisoning the cats rather than shooting them. When Tummler and Solomon break into Jarrod's house with masks and weapons with intent to hurt him, they find photos of the young teen in drag and his elderly grandmother, who is catatonic and attached to life support machinery. The poacher Jarrod is forced to care for her, which he had earlier opined was "disgusting." Tummler's original intention was to hurt the poacher for killing the cats that they were killing for profit but he was not home. He then discovers the grandmother laying in her bed, opines that it is, "no way to live," and turns off the life support machine.
A number of other scenes are interspersed throughout the film, including: an intoxicated man (played by Harmony Korine) flirting with a gay dwarf; a man pimping his Down Syndrome afflicted sister to Solomon and Tummler; the sisters encountering a child molester; a pair of twin boys selling candy door-to-door; a brief conversation with a tennis player who is treating his ADD; a long scene of Solomon eating dinner while taking a bath in brown water; a drunken party with arm- and chair-wrestling; and two skinhead brothers boxing each other in their kitchen. A number of even smaller scenes depicting satanic rituals, racist conversations, and some disturbing hygiene round out the film.
The final scene in the movie is set to the song "Crying" by Roy Orbison, which had been previously mentioned by Tummler as the song his older brother would sing (the brother eventually went to the "Big City" and abandoned him). The final scene involves Solomon and Tummler shooting the sisters' cat repeatedly with their air rifles in the rain with jump cuts to Bunny Boy kissing the teenage girls in a swimming pool. The film ends with Bunny Boy running towards the camera through a field holding the body of the dead cat, which he displays prominently.
The film was shot in some of Nashville's poorest neighborhoods. Producer Cary Woods comments, "we're essentially seeing the kind of poverty that we're used to seeing in Third World countries when news crews are covering famines, [but] seeing that in the heart of America." One small home housed fifteen people and several thousand cockroaches. Bugs literally crawled up and down the walls.[1] Korine comments, "we had to take out stuff to be able to put the camera in the room."[6] At times, the crew rebelled against filming in such conditions and Korine was forced to purchase hazmat suits for them to wear. Korine and Escoffier, who thought this was offensive, "wore Speedos and flip-flops just to piss them off."[4]
Korine encouraged improvisation and spontaneity. To achieve this, Korine had to establish a mode of trust. "If an actor is a crack smoker, let him go out between takes, smoke crack, and then come back and throw his refrigerator out the window! Let people feel they can do whatever they want with no consequence."[6] Producer Scott Macaulay commented the improvisational methods yielded deep results for everyone involved. "For a lot of the non-actors, you sensed that it was a very emotional experience for them, and that they were tapping into something important."[1] Korine adds, "I wanted to show what it was like to sniff glue. I didn't want to judge anybody. This is why I have very little interest in working with actors. [Non-actors] can give you what an actor can never give you: pieces of themselves."[6]
Korine wanted each scene to be shot with different visual looks and styles. While many scenes are shot in traditional pre-planned 35mm, Korine handed out 8mm, 16mm, Polaroid, VHS and Hi-8 cameras to his crew, friends and family to achieve an enhanced collage-like style. "I wanted everything to feel that it was done for a reason. Like they shot it on video because they couldn't get it onto 35mm or they shot it on Polaroids because that was the only camera that was there... I felt like shooting each scene on its own terms and then making sense of it afterwards. And I felt that the styles would blend, that there would be a cohesiveness."[6]
On the last day of shooting, Escoffier shot the chair-wrestling kitchen scene alone with a rigged boom on his camera. Some people had just gotten out of prison and Korine felt the performance would be greater if he wasn't in the room. The crew shut all the doors and turned off all the monitors, so no one knew what was going on. In between takes, Korine would run in and get everyone hyped up. At the end of the scene there is a moment of silence where no one knows what to do next. Korine comments, "When I saw that in the dailies, it amazed me, because Jean Yves really captured that awkwardness, that sad silence; it was beautiful."[4]
Korine shot Gummo in just four weeks during the summer of 1996, most of the film being shot on the very last day of production. This was due to the crew waiting for rain. The last scene that was shot for the movie is the one with Korine starring a heavily intoxicated and homosexual boy on a couch with a little person.
Any scenes appearing to show violence against animals were simulated, sometimes using prosthetic animals.[7] ... (more)

Release date : 24 November 1997
UPC: 794043523625

1990s (9), Drama (9), Usa (6), 1997 (6), (5), Black Metal (5), Tornado (4), Poetry (4), Korine (3), Experimental (3), Surrealism (3), Skinhead (3), Tap Dance (3), Disturbing (3), Weird (3), Black Comedy (3), Ohio (2), White Trash (2), 90s (2), Cat (2)

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"Skidisti depressiivinen ja häiriintynyt, kuvaus pikkukaupungin lähiöelämästä, saatanallisin vivahtein. Häiriintynyttä huumoria, oksettavia kohtauksia, sekavaa käyttäytymistä ja loistava Soundtrack. Hipoo täydellisyyttä"

onclelapin voted for a review of Gummo 2 months ago

“Problematic, troubling, dangerous even, but breathtakingly original, and absolutely true to the times. The cutting edge doesn't get any sharper than t”

onclelapin voted for a review of Gummo 2 months ago

“Lots of films get described as "fucked up", but very few have actually lived up to that description. You have exploitation garbage like "Cannibal Holo”

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"Day 18 - A film randomly chosen from you "want to watch" list I loved this so much. That reminds me, in a certain way, the cinema of John Waters, with his emphasis on marginality, but in a approach closer to the documentary. Every character is wonderful, and the scenes and dialogues are particularly strong and funny. To watch and rewatch."

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" I'd love to make a movie like this one day about the city I'm from, everything in this movie seems like it could've and probably has taken place within a 1-2 mile radius of where I grew up."

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Gummo (1997)

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