The worst movie I have ever seen

Bruno Dumont's 2003 film Twentynine Palms had a reign of 12 years, 10 months and 22 days as the worst film I have ever seen.

That reign is now over.

And July 12, 2023 is a day that will go down in infamy.

Considering that I named Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers my second favorite film of the previous decade, you'd think I would have acquainted myself with his entire filmography as a director by now. In fact, that isn't all that close to being the case. 

Setting aside films he only wrote -- Kids -- the only films he'd directed that I'd seen were Gummo, The Beach Bum and the aforementioned Breakers. I liked the first and third and hated the second. (I didn't much care for Kids but at least I have a grudging respect for it.)

That left a whole three Korine-directed films I hadn't seen: Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), Mister Lonely (2007) and Trash Humpers (2009). (There's also a 2003 "television documentary," as it's described on Wikipedia, called Above the Below, but movies that debuted on television 20 years ago, before the streaming era, present categorization issues for me. So I'm going to set that one aside.)

It was last night, a fateful Wednesday night in July -- a winter night here in Australia -- that I encountered Trash Humpers on MUBI, and threw it on due to its 77-minute brevity. 

This was not my first awareness of Trash Humpers. Unlike Mister Lonely, which I had not heard of until a friend mentioned it in the context of Korine's career during a mid-movie message chat, Trash Humpers was a piece of toxic cinematic sludge (or so I assumed) that crept into my awareness possibly through an Entertainment Weekly review at the time it came out. Indeed, in googling it I am seeing that Owen Gleiberman was the critic, and though I'm not going to re-read his review now, the F he gave it stands out clearly in my memory.

Is there such a thing as an F minus?

Before I start tearing into Trash Humpers, I have to start by stating a couple things clearly.

It's hard to ever really be sure that a movie you are watching is the worst you have ever seen. A while ago, I made a policy not to add a movie to my Flickchart until 30 days after I'd seen it, to calm my initial feelings, positive or negative, and gain enough perspective to rank it properly. A movie that moves you greatly or angers you greatly may settle into something more even-keeled upon a month of reflection. 

The second thing to state is that there is arguably something positive and useful about a movie that angers you. In this line of thinking, anything that stimulates a strong response is doing something right, either because to anger you was the filmmaker's intention (meaning they succeeded in what they set out to do) or because it is hitting close to home in some way that warrants introspection in the viewer. These are both within the broadly outlined goals of art. In this line of thinking, a person's least favorite film of all time should actually be the most lame, the most cynical or the most technically disastrous movie they'd ever seen, not the one that they found the most off-putting.

All I can say for sure, though, is that if I were to add Trash Humpers to my Flickchart today, it would lose its duel to Twentynine Palms.

What exactly is so God-awful egregious about this movie?

Well, the poster above should tell you a lot about what the experience of watching this movie feels like. These two "characters" -- men in masks/makeup to make them look elderly -- join a third female character (played by Korine's wife, Rachel, who is also in Spring Breakers) to form this film's trio of "protagonists." I call them "characters" because they are not developed beyond their tendency to make humping motions at trash cans, trees and other inanimate objects, smash and shatter television sets and plastic dolls, and engage in other general mayhem. They do occasionally speak but more often they communicate in rooster sounds. 

Their narrative-free existence involves occasionally rubbing elbows with other characters -- some of them children, some of them prostitutes, some of them other Leatherface-like rednecks without the makeup -- and engaging in conversations (the other characters usually do the talking) that involve acts of debauchery and discussions of genitalia. The language is foul and discriminatory (there's even a warning on MUBI about discriminatory language) and the net result of any scene is nothing close to a lucid commentary on whatever that passage of the film is supposed to be about. These scenes take place in desolate parking lots, rubbish-strewn alleyways and squalid apartments. Violence and sex are simulated almost constantly. The whole thing is captured in grainy VHS, even showing on-screen VCR text like PLAY and PAUSE now and again as the whole thing lags and emits static. 

To give you one idea of a scene that stuck out to me from this mess -- actually one of the tamer scenes -- two men pretend to be twins conjoined at the head with some sort of getup involving panty hose. They squirt a bunch of dish detergent on top of pancakes and eat them while the other characters dance around and chant "Make it don't fake it!" Whatever that means.

I know I am precisely the sort of square Korine is trying to make squirm with these emptiest of empty provocations. Or at least I am playing this role in my distaste for the movie. The thing is, Korine should know that I like a movie he made that isn't so far off from this, Gummo, just for some slight tweaks in the sympathy of his camera and the minute adjustment in his approach to capture a possibly real subsection of the American population. The trash humpers are something out of a non-existent fantasy of depravity, and there is nary a moment of trying to excavate anything redemptive.

I should stick an asterisk next to that, but it's really more of an example of that problematic adage "the exception that proves the rule." Korine closes the film -- it's no spoiler to tell you about the closing scene of this sort of movie -- with an image of the wrinkly female played by Rachel Korine, singing a lullaby to a baby in a carriage on a desolate street lit by sickly lamplight. This seems like an attempt to soften the blow of what we've been watching. But there is nothing empathetic in the character's face as it is still just this saggy makeup/mask that makes this character look like something out of a nightmare. And since we don't know who this baby is, nor do we have any more sense of a progression of narrative than we do in any other scene, it doesn't do anything except identify that Korine knows this has all been too much, and that he has to finish with something that might be considered uplifting from a certain point of view. (The too muchness, some would argue, is the point.)

The other hesitation I have in calling this the worst movie I've ever seen, which speaks to my earlier concerns about labeling it this, is a conversation I had during the movie with the friend I mentioned earlier. (And if you think carrying on a conversation on Facebook while this movie is going on means you have any lesser chance of experiencing what it is providing, you are seriously misunderstanding what it's like to watch this movie, try as I might to explain it.)

My friend loves Spring Breakers as much as I do, but he has a limited love for Korine's entire career for the way it demonstrates this man's progression as an artist. He agrees that there is the immature provocateur in Korine, but he also believes Korine has a vision for demonstrating "something" -- some portrait of the margins that would probably represent selling out to the bourgeois mainstream if it were any bit more accessible than it is. The point is that we're supposed to hate it, but I suppose also that we are supposed to interrogate why we hate it, and this is part of its value. It provokes something in us, which most films do not, and the more raw and unprocessed that is, the better it is doing its job.

This may all be. And in a month's time -- really more than a month before I get to it -- it may not lose that duel to Twentynine Palms. Which might mean writing a post in which I call it the worst film I've ever seen is premature. 

But the reality is, when you have seen nearly 6,500 films, the occasion of watching what might be the worst film you've ever seen is one that requires written reflection -- especially if you write a movie blog.

And the fact remains that I just find Trash Humpers to be chaos for chaos' sake, nihilism for nihilism's sake, trash for trash's sake. 

If I were to conjure up an artistic justification for this film, the closest I might get is that Korine wanted to make an apparently found footage version of the way human beings acted in the early 21st century, if for some reason this were the only document aliens recovered upon arriving on a decimated planet Earth 500 years from now.

And he just thought it would be funny to punk the aliens. 

Just four days ago I added another half-star movie -- the lowest rating you can give without it looking like you just forgot to rate it at all -- to my Letterboxd. That's the new Netflix film The Out-Laws, the review of which you can read here if you are interested in watching me go off on a movie. 

It has a decent chance of being my worst movie of 2023, and I felt for sure it would be my worst movie of July, which is also something I keep track of (along with my best each month). 

But it doesn't stand a chance against the worst movie I've ever seen -- at least for now. 

A second chance for Dumont

Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms is my least favorite movie of all time.

Most people wouldn’t know what movie they hated the most, but I do, because a little website called Flickchart has forced me to make that decision. Once a decision like that is made – that a movie will lose a hypothetical duel to every other movie on your chart – it tends to ossify. So now I know this is my least favorite film like I know that Raising Arizona is my favorite, and it would take a really, really exceptional example to unseat either one.

I won’t go into why I hate it so much. I did that already in this post.

I will say that thus far, this had been a death sentence for its French director. I had so written Dumont off that I had never watched another one of his movies, though I was peripherally aware of a few titles. I didn’t want to give the man one more minute than I’d already sacrificed on his hateful previous film.

But I also believe in second chances.

So nearly nine years after Twentynine Palms etched itself permanently in my cinematic record, I dipped my toe in the Dumont waters again.

The movie Ma Loute, whose English title is Slack Bay, didn’t strike me as anything like Twentynine Palms. As you can probably tell from the poster above, it looks more like something fanciful fellow countryman Jean-Pierre Jeunet would make than the tedious realism of what I described in the above-linked post as “the worst Vincent Gallo movie you can possibly imagine.”

Though obviously going in with my hackles up, I was intrigued. When I saw it on the shelf at the library recently, I snatched it up. Sunday afternoon, I watched it.

Although formally quite different from Twentynine Palms, Slack Bay shares that film’s sense of misanthropy. Bruno Dumont does not think all that much of his fellow human. That attitude is a bit more tolerable, though, when it comes in the form of satire, which is what Slack Bay really is. The costumes and production design might remind someone of Jeunet, but this is really more like Bunuel in its desire to poke fun at the bourgeoisie and engage in class warfare. As I am a big Bunuel fan, that’s a compliment.

The movie deals with a coastal region in France where city folks like to go on holiday. The tides render some of the lower-lying areas impassable, so a family of locals are among those who help the tourists navigate the area by boat, or in one of the film’s more fanciful constructs, even by physically carrying them through knee-deep water. That’s probably one of the film’s most obvious visual metaphors, but that doesn't mean it doesn’t work. The tourists are oblivious in general, but especially in regards to how they treat these working class locals. They’re also foppish fools, flopping about in their fancy outfits and overreacting about everything. Juliet Binoche is the personification of this, in a performance that might have annoyed me if I didn’t ultimately get on the same page as Dumont.

One of the reasons this film is far, far, far more tolerable than Twentynine Palms is that the misanthropy is leavened by a little optimism. There’s actually a sweet romantic undercurrent in this movie as relates to the teenage son of the local family and a teenage daughter of the main family of tourists we follow. There are complications along the way, I can say that without spoiling anything, but Dumont portrays this pair with an earnestness that feels hopeful.

Slack Bay has its disappointments, its moments of tedium. But the truest sign of its ultimate success is that I don’t want to spoil any of the plot, because I do recommend you see it. It’s a mild recommendation, and the movie falls well short of anything Bunuel has done, but it’s a recommendation nonetheless. In fact, in synopsizing the movie a couple paragraphs ago, I was inclined to let you in on a secret about this local family that the film actually reveals early enough on that it might justifiably be included in a synopsis. But Dumont has done enough right with this movie to earn back the courtesy I did not extend to him in that previous post, when I gave away the whole plot of Twentynine Palms just to indicate the depth of my disdain for it.

I’m in no hurry to rush out and see his other films, but no longer do I view him as the personification of cinematic evil, either.

That's a win for a guy who surely doesn't care about earning it. 

58 palms, zero stars

Two of the worst films I've ever seen are both called Twentynine Palms.

Actually, one is called Twentynine Palms, and the other is called 29 Palms. If I knew that Twentynine Palms was not, in fact, 29 Palms, I would have seen only 29 Palms, and wouldn't have the pleasure of knowing just how terrible Twentynine Palms is.

But as of yesterday, I have seen both. And even though I didn't think it could be possible, I'm almost having trouble deciding which is worse. Which is really saying something, since I've told people that Twentynine Palms may be the worst movie I've ever seen.

Let's back up a step or two.

Last July I was approved to review 29 Palms, a 2002 crime caper that appeared to be in the Tarantino mold, starring Chris O'Donnell, Jeremy Davies and Rachael Leigh Cook, and directed by Leonardo Ricagni. I knew nothing about it. I requested it primarily because the title caught my eye. See, my wife and I love the so-called "high desert" to the north of Palm Springs, which includes such towns as Joshua Tree, Yucca Valley, and, you guessed it, Twentynine Palms. In fact, we looked at a potential wedding site in Twentynine Palms, nearly four years ago now.

So this was the movie I thought I was watching when we got our new BluRay player with its streaming Netflix capabilities, last August. In fact, it turned out to be Bruno Dumont's 2004 indie drama Twentynine Palms that we were actually watching. I didn't discover this until the end, when I went to the movie's page on the website I write for. I was shocked to see it had already been reviewed. You mean I sat through THIS ... for NOTHING??

Yesterday I completed the "back 29" of the two Palms movies, and let's just say that all my fondness for that town along the northern edge of Joshua Tree National Park has now evaporated.

What's so awful -- so downright, goddamned awful -- about these two movies? Well, I'll tell you.

Think of the worst Vincent Gallo movie you can possibly imagine, then make it five times more boring, five times more tedious, and five times more needlessly hateful. That sums up Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms to a T. Twentynine Palms makes Gallo's famously obnoxious The Brown Bunny look like a cinematic masterpiece with a dense plot and in-depth character development. In case that reference is lost on you, The Brown Bunny consists almost entirely of Gallo's character driving, and driving, and driving, and driving across country, then reaching Los Angeles and getting a blow job from Chloe Sevigny. Really, that's it. But that's a lot more than happens in Twentynine Palms. In Twentynine Palms, two insufferable characters -- an American man (David Wissak) and a French woman (Katia Golubeva) -- drive out to the high desert, go for Chinese food, go for ice cream, have sex in Joshua Tree National Park, have sex in a pool, argue about frivolous things, and then get raped by hillbillies. Actually, only he gets raped. In the aftermath of the rape, he cuts off all his hair and stabs his girlfriend to death with a knife. After which he wanders around naked and dies of exposure in the desert. The end.

Oops, sorry, did I spoil it for you?

29 Palms is the kind of diarrhea Quentin Tarantino might have shat out after a long night of drinking and getting dosed with Rohypnol. A half-dozen moronic assholes -- Chris O'Donnell, Jon Polito, Michael Rapaport, Jeremy Davies, Rachael Leigh Cook, Michael Lerner and Russell Means -- chase around a bag of money in the desert. Of course, the only reason they're chasing it in the first place is because the most moronic of these assholes -- Rapaport's character, a corrupt cop -- sends this unsecured bag of money via bus, and without anyone to accompany it, from Baker, California to Twentynine Palms. (The town name is always written out with numbers in the movie: 29 Palms.) What follows is a series of Mexican standoffs, unlikely coincidental meetings between the various parties involved, and a chain of possession of the bag that does not even make sense. That's right -- the movie is about a bag of money constantly changing hands, and it can't even keep track of which person has the money at which point of the movie. The whole sloppy mess -- I mean, it's one of the sloppiest movies I've ever seen -- is pasted together with some of the cheapest technique you've ever seen, in which random freeze-frames are supposed to make these moronic assholes seem iconic. It's probably unfair to pick on movies that go straight to DVD, but I've seen a number of straight-to-DVD movies, and this is probably the worst one I've seen. With the cast they had on hand, the teasing becomes much more legitimate. Bill Pullman and Keith David also sullied their hands with this shit.

Oh, and the coup de grace? None of the characters have names. That's one of the most tired attempts at feigned cool that you'll ever find.

In the nearly six months between when I saw Twentynine Palms and when I saw 29 Palms, I have held 29 Palms up on a pedestal of imagined comparative excellence. Now, I'm not even sure I know which one is worse.

On the one hand, Twentynine Palms is at least trying to be some profound, minimalist comment on the nature of male-female relationships, if I am generously crediting Dumont with the best motivations I can possibly ascribe to him. Plus, at least it spells the town's name right. However, I don't think Dumont's motivations are anything but pernicious. I am not going to accuse him of hating Americans, at least not directly -- I'll leave that up to you. However, I will say that the townspeople of Twentynine Palms, when they are presented at all, are presented as xenophobic rednecks who either yell at our main characters or track them down in the desert to anally rape them. I don't think it's a coincidence that there's a military base in the real Twentynine Palms. But whatever message Dumont may or may not be trying to convey is lost in the fact that his movie is unforgivably, relentlessly tedious. It seems to exist only for these brief flashes of shocking sexuality and shocking violence, and otherwise has no purpose whatsoever. It is mean and misanthropic and just ... plain ... terrible.

Then there's 29 Palms. It is as hateful and malevolent as Twentynine Palms, in its own way -- all the characters are grubby lowlifes with basically no motivation but to get their hands on a satchel of money intended for a hitman. Everyone loves a good lowlife now and then, but the characters in Tino Lucente's script are so devoid of any traits, other than their tunnel vision money lust, that there is simply nothing to latch onto here. Plus, director Leonardo Ricagni has a wearying reliance on flashbacks -- flashbacks to parts of the plot that are not even consequential. The only positive thing to say about it is that its lack of a pernicious agenda just makes it an incredibly poorly conceived and executed genre movie. Whereas Twentynine Palms wants to actively inject ill will into our world, 29 Palms just wallows in the ghettos of cliched screenwriting and cinematic hero worship.

I tend to think that when rating movies according to a star scale, the low end is one, and the high end is either four or five -- I prefer five because a) it's what my website uses, and b) it allows for more subtlety in the differences in quality between movies. However, this scale also means that the worst movie you've ever seen is going to get one star.

That seems too generous for either of these movies. These are the types of movie that make me want to whip out The Mother of All Insults -- the zero-star rating. Lord know they deserve it.

But then another problem arises: Which zero is lower?

This is a tough one. I'm going to have to think about it.

I may not know which Palms is worse until I duel them both in Flickchart, and am bound by the results. It's been a couple months since I've discussed the project I'm working on -- re-adding all my movies into a new Flickchart account, to get the most accurate possible rankings using their new ranking system. But I'm making excellent progress as I go through alphabetically. I'm currently in the Ps -- in fact, Police, Adjective was the last film I added. That means the Ts are not far behind.

And when these two movies come up, watch out. It's going to be an epic grudge match.

Fifty-eight palms, and not a single one of them worth shit.

Catapulted into the future - twice

I am an IT guy by day, but that doesn't mean I'm necessarily into the latest and greatest gadgets. As a matter of fact, part of me hates the latest and greatest, because it means I have to learn something new. As an example of that, I'm still using Windows XP on my work computer. It's the same operating system the users still use, so it has its benefits in that respect, but most of my co-workers have been using Windows Vista for some time, and some have even moved on to Windows 7.

This carries over to my need -- or lack thereof -- to have the latest and greatest in entertainment gadgets. On the Mac/PC spectrum, I'm a PC, so it goes without saying that I've left most of Apple's shiny new toys untouched, save the ipod. But it actually took me two to three years longer than most people to get my first one of those -- I didn't have my first ipod (the one I still use) until Christmas of 2006. You'd think, since I'm a huge movie buff, I would have been faster to snap up a DVD player, but no. By the time I got my first one, in 2003, most of my friends had already had theirs for those same two to three years.

I guess you could blame my Puritanical New England upbringing for this. It's not that I didn't see the value in an ipod or a DVD player -- not that I didn't want one. It's that I felt I didn't really deserve one. What had I done that meant I got to have a shiny new toy so soon after it was available? And so with each, I've waited until the point that I thought most other people already had the thing in question, so my purchase of it wouldn't seem like an extravagance, a luxury that I hadn't earned. (Plus, in most cases, the price goes down once something starts to saturate the marketplace.)

You may have figured out where this is going. That's right, about two or three years after most people got theirs, I now finally have my first BluRay player.

The thing is, the ability to watch BluRays wasn't even our big technological advancement of the weekend. See, even though we had it set up starting at about 7 o'clock on Saturday night, we have yet to watch an actual BluRay in our player.

That's because we got one of those BluRay players that streams Netflix on your TV. And that, my friends, was the big, gasping, forehead-slapping leap forward into a new horizon.

After we got the player set up, we debated a bit about the input cables -- whether we should take the one HDMI cable out of our cable box in order to use it for the BluRay, etc. But this was quickly forgotten as soon as the player detected our home wifi. My wife logged into her Netflix account on the TV screen, and voila -- there was her instant online queue of movies to watch. But that's not all. There were also 15-20 other genre categories of suggested movies -- and terrifically specific genres, too. Action/Adventure. Thriller. Horror. Sci-Fi. Documentaries. Foreign Films. Both Comedy and a category called "Witty Films," though we did not immediately see the distinction. TV. And each of these categories had something like 75 titles up for the offering, immediately accessible to us.

Our first impression, which we shared with each other, was that it was like we were in a hotel, choosing between a massive selection of titles, yet all of them were free. So maybe it was more like those exciting plane trips to Australia, where there's no end to the number of gratis options for your eyeballs to look at.

Just to test the connection speed, to see if there would be service interruptions because we were connected wirelessly, we threw on an episode of the original Aeon Flux series from MTV. I expected it to be about five minutes long, but because it crept up to 14, we only half-watched it as we prepared dinner. But the important thing was that it had passed the test -- no dropped service or other service issues whatsoever.

The first thing we watched completely, again from the TV category, was the pilot of Futurama. We needed something short to watch over dinner, as an amuse-bouche before the movie we planned to watch afterward. Sure, you can find Futurama on a number of different networks at any given time of the day. But when do you ever stumble across the pilot? Because of this new big-screen access to my wife's Netflix account, we could pick and choose which Futurama we watched.

I wish I could say that the movie we chose was a better first feature-length use of the technology. After a number of giddy trips through the various categories -- and it looks so pretty up on the screen, a line of movie posters passing along from left to right, with the current selection enlarged in the center -- we decided on Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms. Even with the limitless possibilities of the new device, I was still in killing two birds with one stone mode. See, I had gotten approved to review Twentynine Palms, and it was in my wife's instant online queue, which means she wanted to see it too. So onward we went. It was only after we'd finished what I consider to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen (which really deserves its own post -- or maybe doesn't deserve it, because that might encourage other people to subject themselves to it) that I realized there was already a review on my site for this movie. Turns out I'd been approved to review Leonardo Ricagni's 29 Palms, from 2002, not Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms, from 2004. Bummer, because I was super excited to rip into this movie. Instead, somebody else got to do it.

We did have a couple short service interruptions this time. To add insult to the injury of watching this particular film, one dropped signal came with less than two minutes remaining, and we almost decided just to shitcan those last two minutes. But we overcame the three minutes of being down and finished the movie. I must say, I was a little concerned about losing our connection two or three times total.

Until Sunday afternoon, when we watched Lance Hammer's excellent debut feature Ballast (also from my wife's instant online queue), and experienced nary a signal drop throughout. Score.

As for the BluRays ... well, we may wait until we get the HDMI cable thing sorted out before we sit down for an entire one. We want it to blow our minds, right? It was excited enough just to make our first two BluRay purchases. I don't know that we're going to amass a huge BluRay collection -- we're trying to be more sensible about such things, and besides, we have a child on the way -- but it was no problem deciding to purchase one BluRay as part of the ceremony of buying the player. We chose that one rather easily -- Where the Wild Things Are -- and paid the $29.99 full price for it gladly. However, I also made an impulsive second purchase when I saw that one of my favorite visual feasts of all time -- Bram Stoker's Dracula -- was on sale at Target for only $9.99. Hell, I would have paid $9.99 for it on DVD. So we bought both.

It was Bram Stoker's Dracula that I tested when we first set up the player, and it was Bram Stoker's Dracula whose opening minute did not look any different than a regular DVD. I am hoping this is just our current cabling setup, not an actual deficit in our BluRay player or our TV. I'm told that HDMI is a must for BluRay, and I'm excited to get that resolved this week.

The future ... it can be scary, and it can seem like you don't deserve it. But once you get here, it feels very, very good.