REVIEW: Street Trash (1987)
Imagine if Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" was about runaway brothers, homeless men, serial killers, rape, castration, necrophilia, revenge, Vietnam, the mafia, and a brand of tequila that caused the imbibers to violently melt into primary-colored puddles of goo. There is a game of "Monkey in the Middle" played with a severed penis. There are bloody fistfights. There is stabbing in the back with a knife carved out of human bones. There's lots of urine, and a scene of a cop vomiting on an unconscious hitman's head (which, of course, is in a piss-filled urinal).
Have you got your head around that? Good. Now make it a comedy, and you have James Muro's recently-pressed-to-DVD "Street Trash," the film that I've been wanting to see since I first saw the photo of a man melting into a toilet back in a 1987 issue of Fangoria. It's a film that's so grimy and disgusting that my friend Joe called it "worth seeing." Is it a horror film? Is it a love story? Is it a tearjerker about the homeless plight? Let's find out.
Despite being a low-budget gore film at heart, the filmmakers decided to dream big with "Street Trash," eschewing the standard smallish plots of their drive-in peers and aiming for something that hints at 'epic.' It doesn't quite make it to epic, but it tries, throwing in as many storylines and threads as its running time allowed; I get the feeling that in a perfect world, this movie would be the 'Citizen Kane' of exploitation and trash cinema. It opens with a screwball chase scene with a homeless man who's stolen a bunch of money and some alcohol on the run, which sets the tone for the film -- everything that isn't explicitly slapstick is mere inches away. After the chase, we veer towards the malevolent Vietnam vet that rules the homeless society and occasionally murders pedestrians, the overly-violent brute cop that's trying to take him down, the brother of the first bum who's in love with a garbage dump's owner's secretary, the crazy hobo that tries to abscond with frozen chicken, the mafioso whose doorman allowed his alcoholic wife to stumble away into the night, where she was raped and murdered by an insane gang of the homeless (and then raped post-mortem by the trashyard owner), and about a dozen other lines that are probably worthy of their own films. Oh, yeah, there's the Tenafly Viper tequila, which melts people in horrifyingly gory sequences every now and again.
You'd think that (or at least I assumed that) the Viper would play a huge role in the flick, considering that it makes up about 100% of the advertising for 'Street Trash'; that's how they're selling the movie. If this were a different movie, I'd say that the Viper scenes were too few and far between, but I actually came away from this movie pleasantly surprised that I wasn't bored by the non-gory bits. This film has some of the most repulsive ideas ever burned to film, but it's all handled so lightly and playfully that it's kind of hard to be truly repulsed. Everyone and everything in the movie has such a comic-booky quality, that it's easy to see that it's not meant seriously; it's hard to be truly offended by it, since everything is broad and everyone is almost uniformly despicable (or at least unlikable). Plus, the melting scenes are all pretty neat.
Do I recommend the movie? Hard to say. I'm glad I've seen it, but this is one of the last movies that I'm going to bring to show-and-tell night at the video outpost. I guess Joe is right: if you're a certain kind of person, then the movie is "worth seeing." (If for no other reason, the movie is worth it for the scenes between the mafioso and the doorman.)
I have to go shower again. Just thinking about this movie makes me feel grimy.
Have you got your head around that? Good. Now make it a comedy, and you have James Muro's recently-pressed-to-DVD "Street Trash," the film that I've been wanting to see since I first saw the photo of a man melting into a toilet back in a 1987 issue of Fangoria. It's a film that's so grimy and disgusting that my friend Joe called it "worth seeing." Is it a horror film? Is it a love story? Is it a tearjerker about the homeless plight? Let's find out.
Despite being a low-budget gore film at heart, the filmmakers decided to dream big with "Street Trash," eschewing the standard smallish plots of their drive-in peers and aiming for something that hints at 'epic.' It doesn't quite make it to epic, but it tries, throwing in as many storylines and threads as its running time allowed; I get the feeling that in a perfect world, this movie would be the 'Citizen Kane' of exploitation and trash cinema. It opens with a screwball chase scene with a homeless man who's stolen a bunch of money and some alcohol on the run, which sets the tone for the film -- everything that isn't explicitly slapstick is mere inches away. After the chase, we veer towards the malevolent Vietnam vet that rules the homeless society and occasionally murders pedestrians, the overly-violent brute cop that's trying to take him down, the brother of the first bum who's in love with a garbage dump's owner's secretary, the crazy hobo that tries to abscond with frozen chicken, the mafioso whose doorman allowed his alcoholic wife to stumble away into the night, where she was raped and murdered by an insane gang of the homeless (and then raped post-mortem by the trashyard owner), and about a dozen other lines that are probably worthy of their own films. Oh, yeah, there's the Tenafly Viper tequila, which melts people in horrifyingly gory sequences every now and again.
You'd think that (or at least I assumed that) the Viper would play a huge role in the flick, considering that it makes up about 100% of the advertising for 'Street Trash'; that's how they're selling the movie. If this were a different movie, I'd say that the Viper scenes were too few and far between, but I actually came away from this movie pleasantly surprised that I wasn't bored by the non-gory bits. This film has some of the most repulsive ideas ever burned to film, but it's all handled so lightly and playfully that it's kind of hard to be truly repulsed. Everyone and everything in the movie has such a comic-booky quality, that it's easy to see that it's not meant seriously; it's hard to be truly offended by it, since everything is broad and everyone is almost uniformly despicable (or at least unlikable). Plus, the melting scenes are all pretty neat.
Do I recommend the movie? Hard to say. I'm glad I've seen it, but this is one of the last movies that I'm going to bring to show-and-tell night at the video outpost. I guess Joe is right: if you're a certain kind of person, then the movie is "worth seeing." (If for no other reason, the movie is worth it for the scenes between the mafioso and the doorman.)
I have to go shower again. Just thinking about this movie makes me feel grimy.
sent by The Retropolitan at 7:36 AM
...2 RESPONDO-GRAMS:
Wow. I forgot having seen this film until you mentioned the people who melt into colored goo. I don't recall when I saw it, and I'm pretty sure I was only able to catch part of it, but I do remember the guy melting on the toilet.
Huh. I don't know if I want to see it again or not.
If you do decide to take another look, I hear that there's a deluxe 2-disc special edition on the way.
Also, I heard somewhere that Bryan Singer was a grip on the film. And -- this will mean nothing to most of you -- the film apparently takes place in Greenpoint, in Brooklyn, on my friend's street.
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