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Sick,
grotesque, disgusting and repulsive are
all words that accurately describe the '80s cult flick Street
Trash. But so does funny — and there lies the
difference between crap and art. Sort of. Made for a budget
that might well have been pieced together from hocking personal
possessions or collecting aluminum cans, the fact that this
sucker got made at all is amazing. I'm sure it was a labor of
love but a stranger love you'd be hard pressed to find. Made
with the desire to shock and repulse, Street
Trash has more energy and verve than most films with
twenty times the budget. Moments of inspiration are many, and
even if the seams often show so does the pure love of movies
and a good 'bad' joke. Caution is necessary when introducing
this little gem to people. If a brief synopsis makes you shy
away then I'd advise you to follow that instinct. But if the
idea of a movie that wants to press every sick "Eeeuuww!"
button it can find (or afford) appeals to you, then dive in
— it's a hoot and a half for fans of the cheap and sleazy.
Set
in what appears to be the grimiest bad-side-of-the-tracks area
of a nameless city, the film focuses on several unsavory homeless
people holed up in a junkyard. Freddy (Mike Lackey) and his
younger brother Kevin (Mark Sferrazza) have temporarily settled
here, even constructing a semiprivate spot among the discarded
tire piles. The owner of the yard, Mr. Schnizer (R. L. Ryan),
is allowing the bums to squat on his property only because his
gorgeous office worker Wendy (Jane Arakawa) badgers him into
it and he hopes to get into her pants. Freddy is a bit of a
shit with few morals and even less concern for his brother.
He spends his days scrounging for booze or money to buy booze
and when the local liquor store offers some 60-year-old stuff
called Tenafly Viper for a dollar a bottle, he picks it up.
He doesn't pay for it but... when this bottle of questionable
vintage is stolen it seems to be good luck for him. The bum
that sucks down the stuff swiftly melts into a puddle of colorful
semisolid goo with nothing but his clothes left to establish
identity! Rough tough mo-fo cop Bill (Bill Chepil) investigates
the death but isn't getting anywhere even with a mysterious
open bottle of Viper sitting right next to the liquefied corpse.
(Thinking is not Bill's strong suit.) Meanwhile, padding out
the running time —
I mean showing us the ugly
underbelly of these poor unfortunate's lives —
we see Freddy pick up a drunken
bimbo who accompanies him back to the tire pile for a quickie.
After Freddy's done he staggers away, leaving her to the not-so-tender
mercies of the rest of the yard's denizens. The next morning
Mr. Schnizer discovers her beside the river that flows past
the place. The fact that she's dead doesn't stop him from having
his turn. (I told you it was sick.) No big deal until the bimbo
turns out to be the local mob boss/restaurateur's girlfriend,
causing him to hire a hit on our boy Freddy. Well, after a fire
escape-dwelling bum downs some Viper and melts onto some passing
pedestrians, Bill kicks his investigation into gear and focuses
on homeless Vietnam vet Bronson (Vic Noto), who thinks he rules
the junkyard. Bronson is as crazy as a rat trapped in a coffee
can (cue the combat flashbacks) and sports a knife lovingly
crafted from a human femur bone. Besides using said knife to
threaten his underlings, in one unforgettably amusing scene
he cuts off a bum's penis and then instigates a game of Keep
Away, with the victim trying to recover his manhood. Depending
on your point of view this is either the nadir of the film or
its zenith —
I vote for the latter. Bad cop Bill finally has enough after
kicking the shit out of a hit man sent to kill Freddy and goes
after Bronson for a one-on-one duel to the death that brings
the movie to a close. It doesn't wrap up the various storylines
but the film does end. I guess they figured 102 minutes was
long enough and it was time for a shower.
Street Trash is a great movie if
you have a high tolerance for sick humor and even sicker special
effects gross-out scenes. I can easily understand why this has
had such a strong cult following, with the melting bum sequences
being more than enough to cause gorehounds to drool. With melting,
puking, spitting and bleeding this is easily one of the most
MOIST movies I've ever seen. Of course, it's also inventive
and fun even if it really could have been shorter. Most of the
time the film stumbles around like the bums it portrays with
little real purpose other than to get you from one icky thrill
to the next. Continuity errors abound and logic problems are
everywhere but after awhile it seems silly to complain. Even
my question of why the bums constantly have dirt all over their
faces if there's a river flowing by the junkyard seemed pointless
by the third beer — uh, I mean the 45-minute mark. Adding to
the madness, in the middle section of the film the Tenafly Viper
deaths are completely forgotten in lieu of the less interesting
mafia hit man subplot. This would be an unforgivable mistake
in a serious film but in a comedy it's more of a knuckleheaded
misstep. This and a few other odd moments seem to indicate they
had a short film idea and needed ways to extend it out to feature
length.
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