Gummo

Lonely residents of a tornado-stricken Ohio town wander the deserted landscape trying to fulfill their boring, nihilistic lives.

• Director:Harmony Korine
• Genre:Drama
• Runtime:89 minutes

Cast

Jacob Sewell : Bunny Boy
Nick Sutton : Tummler
Lara Tosh : Girl in Car
Jacob Reynolds : Solomon
Darby Dougherty : Darby

The film is set in Xenia, Ohio, a small town hit by a tornado in 1974. The film depicts 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 a pre-adolescent boy, known as Bunny boy, wearing only pink bunny ears and shorts 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 boy, Tummler, in a wrecked car with a girl. They fondle each other, and Tummler realizes there is a lump on 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. Read more

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