DIRECTED BY: Jim Muro
FEATURING: Mike Lackey, Jane Arakawa, Bill Chepil, Vic Noto, Mark Sferrazza, James Lorinz
PLOT: In a junkyard ruled by a sadistic gang of hobos, bums endure a plague of rotgut that makes them melt.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Probably the major inspiration for the slicker and more self-parodying Hobo with a Shotgun, Street Trash is a trashy trip through a junkyard full of deranged derelicts engaging in bad behavior like drinking, raping, mutilating, and smelling bad. It’s often strange and largely plotless, wandering from one absurd and blackly comic vignette to another; but it’s so mean-spirited and grossout-oriented that it ranks no higher than a guilty pleasure.
COMMENTS: Budding screenwriters will want to avoid studying Street Trash carefully. It’s full of scenes that make you wonder, “why is this in the movie?” Consider longish scene of a minor hobo character shoplifting at the local grocery store, stuffing frozen chickens down his pants. He’s caught, but escapes by putting a paper bag over his head and crashing through the storefront window. The scene lacks any sort of obvious purpose or resolution, and it’s in no way connected to the putative plotline about expired booze causing bums to melt into fluorescent lumps of goo. But it’s typical of Street Trash, which doesn’t care too much about standard plotting or logic; instead, it’s a spoofy fantasy survey of a nihilistic junkyard society of outcasts. The aimlessness of the story actually reflects the lives of the characters, who while away their days scrounging for dollars and cheap thrills until the bottle eventually gets them, and the lack of direction is all part of Street Trash‘s design. The longer the movie goes on, the less sense it makes, and the better it gets. Although it is filled with weird details—the chief baddie’s femur-knife, a ‘Nam flashback-hallucination sequence, a guy running around with his penis cut off–Street Trash‘s agenda is more to gross you out than to weird you out. Therefore we get jokes about castration, gang rape and necrophilia. The problem with these gags is not so much that they’re tasteless as that they’re mostly not funny: they’ve got all the humor of kids sneaking peeks at dirty pictures during recess. A gang of bums playing keep-away with a severed penis is something you don’t see everyday, but the scene isn’t structured as a joke—it’s a premise without a punchline. The few instances where Street Trash proves it does have a sense of humor—the moment when a cop passes up the obvious chance to piss on his beaten adversary in favor of a more creative humiliation—make the fact that the movie usually settles for just being disgusting a disappointment. The “melt” scenes, where derelicts condense into mucilaginous mutants splattered in tie-dye colors, are impressive, though, especially considering the tiny budget. They will prove the major attraction for many. Like a dollar bottle of wine, Street Trash hits hard, is dizzying fun for a while, and may send the neophyte running for toilet.
Poorly distributed (because of its content), Street Trash became something of a minor VHS legend. Even among gorehounds, few had seen it. That obscurity made it a shock when, in 2006, Synapse released the movie in a Criterion-quality 2-disc edition, complete with two separate audio commentaries and a 2-hour making of feature (!) All these extras were ported over to the 2013 Blu-ray edition
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan, who asked, “What was that movie based off a Kurosawa flick? It had poorly written dialog, it was the only film directed by a special effects man, it had derelicts melting from tainted rum…oh yeah. Street Trash (1987).” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
