Street Trash (1987)
Street Trash aka Horror in Bowery Street screams post-Vietnam, pre-Giuliani, Reagan-ruled ‘80s NYC with its toxic-wasted, radioactive neon, vibrantly vandalised milieu, and dirty depictions of nefarious blown-up hobos. It’s a chaotic and frantic stink bomb of a picture, and as its adroitly articulated tone-setting imagery seeps into our eyeballs, we feel precisely as it intends us to feel—like a bum jumping in the back of a garbage truck, or a geezer ripping a fart in a thieving tramp’s face. I would also submit that only in Street Trash will you witness such a carefully deployed insert of a flabby, running man’s gut.
When a liquor store owner roots out a crate full of Viper—a 60-year-old poison booze once wisely pulled from the market, capitalism dictates he can probs get a buck a bottle—where’s the harm in that, eh? This endeavour inexplicably results in dissolving, disintegrating, and exploding vagrants—giving a whole new meaning to rotgut whisky. Filmed on location in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and based on an original 1984 short also directed by Jim Muro aka Jimmy Muro Jr aka J. Michael Muro, its freakish screen credits include: Drunken Wench, Melted Businessman, Bitchy Businesswoman, Exploding Derelict, Dismembered Derelict, Wheelchair Derelict, Receptive Whore in Van, Whore on Telephone, Other Whores in Van, Smoking Derelict, Viet Cong Vampires, Sundry Junkyard Bums, Perverted Rottweiler, and Fire Escape Cat.
There is, of course, the guilt of demonising the disenfranchised to get over, and then there’s the hurdle of holding down your lunch, but once you do that—if you can, it could be argued that Street Trash is a cognizant art film. Are we witnessing the bravery of a movie that dares to scream at an audience who can’t deal with reality? Is the goop merely Muro’s paint splashed upon a New York City junkyard canvas of rusty fire escapes and corroded old cars? Is Street Trash sharp, socio-political satire with something to say? Is it the dirt and grime; the melty, jelly napalmed, cannibalistic, hungover horrors of war, viewed through the prism of a downtrodden American trash-class—the bastard sons and disregarded daughters of an abusive nation? However, every time my mind made a leap to detect or decipher said socio-political satire, I was either too dumb, too British, or giving Street Trash far too much credit. It’s also possible, of course, that the film is nothing but a deeply insensitive exploitation of wartime PTSD, the U.S. underclass, or just a nasty piece of work.
Confidently provocative, queasy on the eye, and akin to a sleazier—and more depraved, junkyard John Waters, Street Trash is a lurid, effervescent, repugnant, rancid rainbow bumspoitation slime-fest—and much like the pulpy mess it often depicts, it’s sadly an unformed mass of matter as opposed to an artful brushstroke—or even a Jackson Pollock-esque pebble-dash splatter, but it’s also simultaneously too dumb to really be upsetting; too despicable to be fun or really funny. I filed it as a misguided sendup with nothing at all to say, but plenty of content to shallowly offend, which is a shame because all it really would’ve taken is an afternoon of considering what this piece could possibly mean during the writing stages, and yet evidently no one bothered—no one had the forethought or good sense to do just that, which is what divides it from the truly great satirical horrors such as Romero’s Dawn, or the skewering social commentary of a cutting-edge Cronenberg. The scariest quality of Street Trash—though it’s not really supposed to be scary, is that it had the ghastly potential to drag us anywhere at any point. I felt that literally anything could happen at any given moment, and that so rarely occurs in cinema in this day and age.
The influence of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead is so prevalent it cannot even be measured. As with other, at a glance trashy, cheap, chuckaway, gross-out flicks, there’s a strong case for the photography—see Braindead aka Dead Alive—they’re often inventively shot and lit, and David Sperling’s mobile camera is no exception. His keen eye frames bright yellow buildings, and clear blue sky backdrops. I love the opening tracking shot, which bought a lot of time with me cinematographically. I responded to the yellow on black title credit font. I was struck by the one sheet art, the multicoloured gunk, technicolor blood and guts, and the audacious attempt at non-intellectual body horror—how the sheer schlockiness of this stuff plays if you don’t happen to have the intellect of a David Cronenberg. Having said that, these bodily explosions unequivocally put Scanners to shame. It’s Troma-esque, but with—at the very least, a smidgen more technical ability and prowess.
The frankly insane sight of a homeless man being dissolved into a toilet covered in acrylic paint, with his severed hand still clutching the chain—his face now a blue liquid ooze in the bowl, will likely never leave me, and isn’t that what cinema—particularly horror cinema, is all about? Even the offy owner that looks like ELO’s Jeff Lynn melts horribly with red and orange sludge dripping down his trouser legs, and grotesquely attempts in vain to crawl off down the street. Winette, Bronson’s junkyard bit of skirt, perishes with leaking, multicoloured boobs before splashing herself across a rusty vehicle as part of a vague Vietnam recollection. The brash character of Bronson is a fully bonkers, Section 8 Nam vet, and self-designated king of the derelicts, who pulls the neighbourhood nomads’ strings—lording over them as an unhinged, abusive, roundhouse kicking, human femur bone-handled knife-wielding psychopath, and murderous puppet master.
Like scratching an itch you didn’t know you had, there’s something mesmerising, and pornographically compelling about colourful exploding people. A key case in point being Street Trash’s twisted answer to Violet Beauregard from Wonka—a bloke blowing up like a blueberry, popping like an infected zit, and spraying himself up a wall. Or take Wizzy—clawing open his own torso to reveal purple gore—a liquefying Freddy Krueger face, and then detonating like a dodgy bath bomb against the graffiti’d wall like a yucky Banksy—as if a big bag of Skittles had all melted together atop a strangely edible-looking ice cream cake. Not to forget the movie’s toxic, yellow crud dripping from stairwells, erupting toes, a cop whose special finishing move is to piss, or hurl on people, the gas canister decapitation, bum fights, a repugnant syphilitic perv, and an upskirt of death denoument ensuring Street Trash is sleazy to its bitter end.
The further Street Trash strays from the toxic booze and melting winos, the less I humoured it. The more depraved it became—and it is honestly filled with every despicable act that could possibly be imagined—I was turned off. It’s the cinematic equivalent of puking in an alley, or finding a muerto moggie in the rubbish. Having heeded this warning, if you are indeed compelled to see a man get his cock cut off, then have the dismembered member hoofed like a field goal, and lobbed across a scrap yard, a drunk gal taken back to a smoky salvage yard hovel only to be dragged away to an unknown fate by a ghoulish gaggle of animalistic and monstrous vagrant voyeurs, or perhaps most egregiously, a played for laughs, off-screen necrophiliac rape—all are on offer here. I’m relieved to say, comedically-scored sex attacks are not my cup of tea. Yes, it has been said that everything in life can be considered darkly humorous until it happens to us, but it’s a comic tightrope these filmmakers are not deft enough to negotiate—with dialogue resembling improv chatter from a bad dream, Street Trash plays as misjudged, and left a lingering bad taste.
Scarious Artists 