Written and directed by 23-year-old Kids scribe Harmony Korine, Gummo makes Kids look like Saved by the Bell. The film depicts a white-trash Midwestern town apparently cursed by God -- nothing else, not the tornadoes, not the squalor, not the parental neglect, explains why the kids are all zombies bereft of any human quality save the desire for sensation.

A plotless series of vignettes, Gummo is narrated by Solomon (Jacob Reynolds) and Tummler (Nick Sutton), who kill stray cats to sell to a butcher, spending their earnings on glue to sniff. With his cast of mostly amateurs, who look like the mutants of Diane Arbus photographs, Korine presents a human sideshow of equal-opportunity exploitation. The director himself plays a youth making a drunken pass at a gay black encephalitic dwarf, implying that no one, including the audience, is fit to pass judgment.

As its details accrete, Gummo (named for the forgotten Marx Brother) appears less a cynical act of calculated outrage than an affirmation that, even amid the endless spectacle of cruelty and horror, life can offer some isolated, poetic moments of weird beauty. Still, it's hard to imagine who'll want to sit through Gummo waiting for those moments to arrive. At the Harvard Film Archive.