Last March, a film that poked fun at the slow-witted, backwoods folk of a tiny upstate New York town was released to poor reviews and virtually no audience.  Drowning Mona was a sloppy whodunit that tried too hard to be quirky and instead came off as a dull Fargo copycat.

Conversely, Poor White Trash succeeds where Mona went horribly wrong. It also deals with characters more likely to spit tobacco juice than mouthwash, but instead of upstate New York, Trash is set in Sunrise, Illinois.  The film opens with the bumpkin duo of Michael (Tony Denman, G vs. E) and Lennie (Jacob Tierney, This is My Father) trying to steal non-alcoholic beer from the local grocery (called The L’il Store).  One blow-up doll and a burnt Chevy Vega later, the two have been nabbed by the authorities, a move that could potentially threaten the future of college-bound Michael.

Meanwhile, Michael’s mother Linda (Sean Young, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective) has just been fired from her nursing home job.  Times have been hard for Linda (her husband, a one-eyed professional wrestler, abandoned her and Michael), but the thought of her only son being turned away from secondary learning (and, thusly, a ticket out of Sunrise) is just too much for her to handle.  A plan is hatched to raise money to hire Lennie’s grandfather to represent the boys in court.

Their plan doesn’t involve a bake sale or a car wash - rather a series of trailer burglaries.  And Lennie’s grandfather (William Devane, Space Cowboys) turns out to be a shit-kickin’ hillbilly with a strip-mall law office (called “Ron Lake’s Land o’ Law”), a hot young wife (Jaime Pressly, Jerry Springer’s Ringmaster) and several impressive beer-can sculptures.  Hilarity ensues, leading up to a big gunfight finale. M. Emmet Walsh (Wild Wild West) even makes an appearance as the town justice – like who else would you get to play a backwater judge?

Trash isn’t filled with stars, nor is it particularly well-written or evenly executed, but it’s still a lot of fun to watch.  Unlike Mona, the film doesn’t take itself too seriously, a point driven home by writer/director Michael Addis, who mocked his film’s lack of complexity in the Q&A session following the screening of this film at the Cleveland International Film Festival.  Addis, who makes his directorial debut here (he was an editor on Kounterfeit), presented the film with a goofy, hyper smile and even thinks his film may have pissed off the locals in Benton, Illinois, where the film was shot.

Addis, who played a cop in Trash and was a writer on The Man Show, even poked fun at Sean Young, telling a story of how the actress truly suffered for her art.  At one point, she rhetorically screamed, “Who do I have to fuck to get off this film?”  When somebody replied, “Addis,” Young said she’d stay on.  It’s jokes like these that make Trash a surprisingly funny film.

1:25 –

but contains graphic violence, adult language and sexual content