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List Price: $24.98 | | Label: New Line Home Video
Salesrank: 3820
Released: March 20, 2001 |
| Our Price: $5.79 |
| Used Price: $5.42 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
From Harmony Korine, screenwriter of Kids, comes a haunting portrait of life in small-town America. Through a collection of dreamlike and devastating images, Korine offers a glimpse of Xenia, Ohio, a world existing in the aftermath of a tornado.
Gummo Reviews:
American Grotesque 
2009-11-21 - I had to watch "Gummo" in several sittings. It is unrelentingly grotesque. That is not necessarily a bad thing, though. American Grotesque has been a staple of American literature and art since the beginning.
"Gummo" dives into the town of Xenia OH. several years after a series of catastrophic tornadoes hit the town. The denizens who we meet are a traumatized lot. They get through their days by killing, and occasionally torturing cats, pimping the mentally disabled, trashing their own houses, huffing glue, and committing incest. The kids, as befits the writer of Kids, carry the narrative, insofar as there is a narrative.
My initial impression was that the film is an elitist enterprise aimed at demonstrating the irredeemable depravity of "poor white trash" - an urban caricature of a hick town. Now I'm not so sure. Anyone who has spent time in white working-class neighborhoods will have their buttons pressed. The film resonated with me - which was disturbing. The characters are way too familiar. I grew up around kids with BB guns who shot cats. (Although I doubt that they sold the carcasses to the local Chinese take-out, as happens here.) The kids around me huffed anything they could get their hands on. The aimlessness of life gets inside of you, and eventually sickens you. That's "Gummo".
I suggest that the key to the flick is the fate of the cats. Extrapolate from them, and you understand what is happening to Xenia, OH.
4 out of 5 though...the editing can be choppy or non-existent. There are some key scenes in the movie - spaghetti in the bathtub for example. But there are a lot of slow moments that only serve to underscore what has already been presented, and these can be exhausting.
Last night...... 
2009-10-20 - Last night I watched a movie. This movie was the worst movie I have ever seen. This movie was about nothing. This movie wasted my night. I hate that I rented this movie. I can't believe they can legally have this movie in the movie store. Horrible, horrible movie.
I could see how some people might enjoy this movie, like if they were sleeping while it was playing. I wish I would have slept instead of watching this trash. Man, please do not waste your time, nobody should like this movie. I dont know how it got such a good review.
Fantastic Magic. 
2009-10-14 - The mind should stop working in narrative, it is just a rule someone created. It is not that this movie is for certain people, in fact its for the opposite. The every day mom and dad, dad and dad, worker, student, your house cat, red headed should all be apart of it. A community function id say. Jokes that sound funny because you thought your on your way to a pun...there is none and it makes it O so much funnier. Rid of your uncomfort break taboos, be wishful and experience.
Disturbingly bad
2009-08-05 - I used to think Manos: The Hands of Fate was the worst movie ever made, but now that I've endured Gummo, I must admit there's a genuine contender for this dubious honor. Manos at least has a plot, and it's incompetence can be chalked up to a director who had zero experience. With Gummo, the people involved actually seem to be deliberately trying to make an "anti-film" that DARES you to watch it.
This is a difficult film to watch on multiple levels. It looks like it was shot with a cell phone held by someone going through nicotine detox. The camerawork alone gave me a headache. However, the biggest problem I had was the narrative. Even ardent supporters of this film acknowledge it has no plot, but is instead a series of vignettes that chronicle a day in the debased lives of poor white trash, strung together in a manner that I will generously call 'stream of conscious.'
This film seems an intentional exercise in over-the-top shock value. One of the opening images is a kid drowning a cat... that alone should tell you if this film is for you. It actually manages to get worse from there, too. One of the tags for this is "comedy". Only to those who like schadenfreude, perhaps.
Gummo is a frankenstein's monster assembled from the love child of Andy Warhol and John Waters. I do not like either filmmaker, so my feelings for this are exponentially amplified. I realize this film has its share of supporters. I find the fact that it has as many 5-star reviews to be as disturbing as the film itself.
Great... 
2009-07-26 - ...if you're mentally disabled or a chair-wrestling trailer park simian.
Describe this movie in one sentence: Inbreeders doing inbred things for no reason.
The basic plot of this movie is a bunch of mentally retarded rednecks lie around some s**thole of a town, talking about a bunch of crap no one cares about. A family of cat-loving albinos put tape on their nipples and jump on beds while some kid who looks like the deformed gnome version of Teller from Penn & Teller and some other kid kill cats and have sex with retarded child hookers.
The movie also features: sweatpants, s**tty haircuts, tennis, songs about V8 pu**ies, bikes with two different sized wheels, a black dwarf, roaches, boring stories about nothing, people who couldn't act their way out of a paper bag and other bull no one cares about. Oh, and I think there's some other cat-killing boy who dresses up like a girl and reads gay magazines, but who could even bother to care?
I Netflixed this because I thought it would be like KIDS, as in horrible subject matter, but well done. No!! Instead it's a horribly done film about nothing.
I'm giving it two stars instead of one because it's so bad you can't help but stare at it and laugh in sadness and I figure it takes some talent to make a movie with literally no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
