Episode #52 -- Ken Park

(or: “Gross”)

Hoo boy.

Over the course of the last fifty plus episodes, the two of us have found ourselves watching movies that we wouldn’t have watched in a million years if not for the premise of this accursed podcast. Pink Flamingos, Cannibal Holocaust, The Remains of the Day, etcetera. You get the idea. Ken Park is the kind of movie that, had it had a little more exposure in the public eye, would have almost definitely found itself on that same list. It’s the second collab between Harmony Korine and Larry Clark, who respectively wrote and directed Kids, and if you know anything about Kids, you might have an idea of why neither of us were looking forward to what lay in store for us. Kids is a good movie, but it’s not a fun movie to watch. It’s a one and done sort of movie.

Ken Park is like Kids, only moreso.

It’s the kind of movie that is going to resonate and be very relevant to some of its audience, but will alienate and turn off just about everyone else. That makes it sound like it could be considered a cult classic, but believe us, you do not want to be part of any cult that’s got Ken Park serving as its foundation. There’s some graphically unpleasant shit in this movie, and Clark’s justification for it is that he’s showing things that other filmmakers won’t show. It’s the kind of thing that sounds reasonable if it were something that you were to hear in passing, but when an example of one of those things is an exhausting depiction of someone engaging in auto-erotic asphyxiation, you can’t but help wonder if maybe there’s a reason why other filmmakers aren’t showing these things. As always, though, your mileage may vary.