Trailer Town

When I was younger and much more impulsive, I would blind-buy random Troma dvds and naturally I was typically quite disappointed with what I bought upon actually viewing it, but at least one of these poorly manufactured films, Trailer Town (2003) directed by Hollywood teen-heartthrob-turned-gutter-auteur Giuseppe Andrews (Touch Me in the Morning, Period Piece), proved to be a well welcomed exception. Like many ‘Troma classics’, Trailer Town is not actually a real Troma production, but merely a film distributed Troma Entertainment so that Lloyd Kaufman and a couple of his cronies can profit off the cinematic labor of some other poor filmmaker.  Regardless, Giuseppe Andrews may be a Hollywood actor whose image countless teenage girls have secretly touched themselves to after seeing him in such sorry films as Independence Day (1996) and Detroit Rock City (1999), but he is also a true blue proletarian auteur and gutter enfant terrible of the quasi-junky sort who grew up in the very same trailer hood that his camcorder-recorded 'outsider films' depict. Indeed, instead of mocking his unhinged untermensch subjects like kosher carny auteur Harmony Korine (Gummo, Spring Breakers), Andrews is the real drug-and-alcohol-addicted quasi-white trash deal as a filmmaker’s whose work Bavarian adventurer auteur Werner Herzog rightly described as reflecting the following, “This place, this trailer park, I have a feeling that this is the real America.” In Trailer Town, there is not a single drop of the superlatively soulless and sentimentalist Hebrew-manufactured pseudo-humanism of Hollywood, but an audacious aberrant array of perversely poetic tragicomedic trash treasures from the sort of forsaken human rabble that spend their entire miserable lives on disability or mindlessly working themselves to death stocking shelves at Wal-Mart. A sort of horrifically humbling yet hyper humorous Amerikkkan Heimat home-movie that demonstrates why the United States is the world’s foremost genetic toilet, Trailer Town is not only true independent cinema, but an absolutely authentic piece of American avant-garde cinema and libertine comedy that features an uniquely unflattering depiction of the USA as the perennially proletarian land of the culture-free and discernibly depraved. A film that proves failed bourgeois, bourgeois bastard Marx did not know shit about the working-class, Trailer Town is a rare piece of American kosher-free comedy that simultaneously cinematically farts on Woody Allen while unwittingly deconstructing every single convention of the comedy genre. A sacrilegious and shit-stained stream-of-consciousness assault on virtually every single pansy ass p.c. American taboo, Trailer Town is the anti-titillating and delightfully debasing tale of a maniac mobile home park owned by a washed-up soap opera star that is inhabited by equally washed-up libertine comedians who cannot seem to crawl out of their whisky and Heineken bottles long enough to leave their post-industrial village of vulgarity. Featuring highly quotable lines like “We drank piña colada by the pool while some rasta fairy piece of garbage fed us papaya” and “Your hole had herpes but I didn’t give a shit. I dove in” as spoken by poesy dipsomaniacs, Trailer Town is Bataille meets Burger King as seen through the cockeyed lens of America’s most warped ex-teenage heartthrob. 

 What is the smartest thing that ever came out of a woman’s mouth? According to bodacious trailer park bum Billy Cossacchi (played by Andrews superstar Bill Nowlin), “Einstein’s dick” is the smartest thing ever to come off a lady’s lips. In Trailer Town, there might not be many Einsteins, but there is surely a curious collection of exceedingly eccentric entertainers who would probably be best described as dystopian alchemists as they surely know how to turn excrement into scathing comedic gold. Indeed, most of the characters in Trailer Town may be one or two drinks away from liver failure, but they know how to live and enjoy life, even in abject squalor. After awaking from a long night of drinking and bullshitting, barroom hero Billy throws off his newspaper sheets and demands that his personal slave negro Stan Patrick aka ‘Stan the Nigger Man’, who fittingly sports and old school coon hat, make him a microwave burrito, which the brown brother does with gusto but not before wrapping it in skidmark-stained underwear. Indeed, Billy boy is certainly the master of his dilapidated mobile domain, but troubles arrives in Nor-Cal paradise when the pre-geriatric garbagecan man receives an eviction notice, thus ultimately culminating in an “aluminum holocaust” of sorts. Of course, before tragedy strikes, tons of bawdy booze-inspired poetry is vomited out by America’s last true rebel wordsmiths. After an exceedingly inebriated fellow named Walt Williamson (Walt Dongo) proclaims his love for getting behind the wheel and driving after drinking countless bottles of cold beer, his belligerent buddy Long Dong Ron (Vietnam Ron)—a bearded bum beast that makes Charles Manson seem like a young cultivated twink—recites a note written to himself, eloquently stating: “I fucked you on a lawn chair…paid for your liposuction…Your hole had herpes but I didn’t give a shit. I dove in. Because I float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. The rasta fairy fucked animals…rolled us joints the size of toilet paper. I got you so stoned that you…allowed me to alienate your asshole with my afghan.” 

 Aside from poetry and spoken word performances, Trailer Town also features candid musical performances, including an up-close-and-personal appearance from a young white trash folk artist who sings a scat-fueled song about his unsettling personal experience with “swamp water pussy,” which he follows up with a story about the real-life experience that influenced the anti-salacious song. An elderly and rather deteriorated fellow named O-Henry (Bill Tyree) goes on a date with diarrhea (which looks like old taco beef) that ends with the old fellow getting lucky and unloading his expired ranch load on the juicy pile of rotten meat. Jolly negro Stan Patrick “tips his hat a little bit” to his would-be-white-master Billy and does a little Stepin Fetchit-esque dance as he “firmly believes” that “country dancing is the answer” to all of America’s problems. After Billy boy makes a heated drunk call to the ‘fuckin’ manager’ of the trailer park where he threatens to call the ACLU due to “some fuckin’ white bitch down here with her fuckin’ white daughter livin’ with a nigger,” among countless other things, total war is declared in Trailer Town. Before the war, Billy strolls into a record store sporting a gigantic strap-on dildo and sombrero and tells the queer store clerk, “Really, what I need is some nigger music. You dirty, nigger-lovin’ cocksucker , suck this, motherfucker. I wanna hang you by your balls and shit blood in your fuckin’ mouth.” After the gay store clerk calls the cops, Billy reveals to him that his “little buttercup turned out to be a nigger fucker” and that “She was a fucking slut that gave money to the bible channel…She put canola all over her hola. She didn’t fuckin’ need to do that.” Billy may be a raving racist who hates his raunchy mudshark of a daughter, but his friend negro Stan knows he is a true sweet heart at heart, ultimately thanking him for helping to take care of “the fuckin’ black, bloody booger that gave me life” (aka his mother).  Meanwhile, wild man Walt Williamson loses his marbles and shoots the fat fanboy lover of his elderly ex-girlfriend. In the end, a pussy redneck security guard with a loaded weapon shows up and the trailer park’s inhabitants, including Billy boy, get on top of their mobile homes and begin to wage battle against a one-bastard army. In the end virtually everyone dies, but not without putting up a fight, which is ultimately the moral of the innately immoral camcorder tale that is Trailer Town. 

 In one of the final scenes of Trailer Town, the creepy character Long Dong Ron tells the strikingly allegorical tale: “There used to be this Mexican girl that lived around here. And she had unbelievable beauty. And she always looked nice. She had tight, black pants. And her hair flowed through the wind. But she lived in this shitty apartment. It wasn’t much bigger than a toilet bowl. And it looked so strange to see such a sweet, little lovely, coming out of such a scum pit. But I’d sit there and watch her come out of that place every day though. I dreamed about riding up on a white horse and taking her away. But I thought to myself, look at what the word does to beauty. Look at where the world puts beauty. They keep beauty in shitholes!” Indeed, if Trailer Town has any message at all, it is that pulchritude and poetry can be found in the most unlikely of unhinged places, namely a Northern Californian trailer park inhabitated by truly gifted ghetto showmen and gutter gurus. According to aberrant-garde auteur Giuseppe Andrews, he followed up Trailer Town with two sequels, but he tragically destroyed both of them (with no copies remaining) before they were ever released. More genuine and empathetic than anything ever directed by Harmony Korine and more waywardly melodramatic than most Fassbinder flicks (Andrews has cited Fassbinder’s I Only Want You to Love Me (1976) as a personal favorite and major influence), Trailer Town is indisputable proof that a couple alcohol-addled white trash degenerates and jaded jigaboos are intrinsically more humorous and likeable than filthy rich Hebraic Hollywood comedians like Jonah Hill, Adam Sandler, and Jon Stewart. An absurdly amateurishly assembled camcorder comedy featuring pointless hardcoded English subtitles, Trailer Town has been a favorite comedy of mine since I originally first saw it about a decade ago or so. A rare unadulterated and authentic America film that really shows the world where white America is headed (and where a large portion of the poor cracker world is at), Trailer Town is, most importantly, an antidote to the thematically nefarious and xenophiliac neo-bolshevik flicks that the psychopathic swindlers of Sunset Boulevard routinely pump out. Forget Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Lena Dunham and other soulless bourgeois hipster hacks, there is more truth in one of ‘Stan the Nigger Man’s’ steaming turds than most ‘highbrow comedy’ director's entire odious oeuvres. 

-Ty E