A cult ‘classic’, Street Trash is a film I have known about since my childhood but somehow was never able to get my hands on till recently. I’d seen small bits and pieces of it before and had read various accounts calling it deliciously gruesome, offensive etc – all the things I look for in a horror movie, naturally. Having finally seen it I can’t say that time has been good to it in most respects, from the dated effects to the unfortunate misogyny. The film’s rampant disregard for women is in truth the only offensive thing here, and while yes we are supposed to be dealing with Street Trash and other assorted dregs dredged from society’s rim, it nevertheless feels like it is reveling in its attitudes.
Like any number of other 80s horror movies, Street Trash deals with toxic waste, or ooze, or some sort of chemical mistake. While some movies use this formula to turn hapless victims in to zombies, here the stuff (in the form of a new brand of alcohol) turns our already near-zombified morons to mush, hissing, melting, and occasionally exploding into colourful puddles of cartoon gore. That’s the biggest letdown of a film I had heard so much about – the low budget is obvious and the effects are poor in the few instances they are actually shown. In many cases we simply get reaction shots of the victim’s tortured face, or the sickened grimaces of bystanders, while squelching, farting sounds bubble into our ear holes. There are a few interesting moments and deaths which would have been more potent at the time of release, but it doesn’t come close to the quality of effects or inventiveness of many other films from the same era.
Having said already that the film treats the female characters mostly as meat or figures of ridicule or hatred, it’s ironic then that the script is the highlight of the film. The dialogue is well written and peppered with one-liners, many dated, many funny, and it fizzes along when it needs to. It’s a shame then that the story is not interesting, the characters unappealing, and the plot bounces around in different directions which all end up going to the same unfortunate place. There are some funny moments and with a higher budget or better effects some of the kills would possibly be rightly seen as classics – where else are you going to see a man melting to nothing while sitting on the can, and then accidentally flush himself away? Other positives include some of the performances – Mike Lackey as the hero (?) is basically excellent, and the city looks ugly and hopeless. In an attempt to make some sort of epic comparing all layers of society as monsters, we get a large cast of characters who sort of intertwine, from Fred and his brother who live in a junkyard with a variety of other hoodlums, to the broken and crazed Vietnam vet Bronson who claims to be King of the yard, to the obese actual owner of the yard and his receptionist, to a burly cop trying to cut out the crime Bronson and his bunch are unleashing, to an Italian American mobster cliché who is having a feud with a mouthy restaurant doorman. With more time and effort, this could have been a gore-filled, low rent Pulp Fiction for the 80s, but instead it comes over as a series of skits. I dearly wanted to like and even love Street Trash, but aside from some good ideas and bad intentions, it doesn’t work. It’s passable, cheesy entertainment that I would still recommend all horror fans see, but unless you grew up with it I can’t see it converting too many new fans.
Let us know in the comments what you think of Street Trash – is it one of your favourites, or should it be confined to the scrap heap?
The Spac Hole 