Gummo (1997) from Johnny Web

Xenia, Ohio is a town that was destroyed by a tornado. The only people still there are the lost of the earth, living in makeshift and ramshackle quarters.

Where did they find all those ugly and deformed looking people?

The people who aren't deformed are living some kind of white-trash nightmare, amid squalor, dirt, dirty bath water, child molesting, incest, and killing cats for profit. Cat-killing, in fact, is the running theme through the movie. In another scene, uncouth drunks arm-wrestle each other interminably.

There is an optimistic monologue delivered by an albino woman to the camera. This speech reeks of sadness because of its optimism is obviously baseless. There is also a stand-up comedy monologue delivered by one of the retarded cat-killing boys, who dreams of being a comedian. The emotional impact again hinges on our awareness of his self-delusion.

There is also a boy wearing a pink bunny hat. He creeps through most scenes, and his great joy is to hang out on a pedestrian bridge over the freeway, where he can piss and spit on the passing cars.

Now if those things were the backdrop for the movie, I guess there could still be hope to salvage it with some trenchant insight, with a satirical eye, or with a plot of devastating impact. Unfortunately, those things are not the backdrop for the movie. They ARE the movie. The movie simply consists of a series of vignettes, and jumps from family to family. The filming is mostly with hand-held cameras, and to make it worse, some of the scenes are shot from moving bicycles and such, making it impossible to get clear focus, or even a stationary subject.

The one thing that saves the movie from complete mindlessness is that some of the individual scenes have a unmistakable power.

• The obese, retarded, but somewhat pretty prostitute is about to have sex with an ugly, deformed-looking, possibly retarded cat killer who is smothered by his momma. The scene between them achieves a certain tenderness that I can't find the words for. And when it does, it goes beyond simple gross-out behavior and reaches for something deep inside.
• There is another scene of the same boy being bathed by his mother in filthy water while he eats a plate of spaghetti and drinks a milkshake. It is so nauseating and so exaggerated that it achieves an elemental level of grotesquerie, like one of those Grand Guignol plays.

Apart from the visceral impact of those scenes, and others, I frankly have no clue what the point was, or why they made this movie. I described it accurately and fairly, you determine if you want to see it.

As for me, I now add this to my list of the five most unwatchable films ever made, but in the bottom slot, replacing "High Strung". These are not necessarily the worst movies, just the most unwatchable. Plan 9 may be a bad movie, but it can be a hoot if you are in the tight mood, and doesn't come close to this list. As I see it, these five movies are nothing but complete wastes of your time in every way, unless you like dead cats.