Street Trash

Street Trash

1987

Directed by J. Michael Munro

So. You know how I have an enduring love for crappy horror flicks made in bad taste with low budgets? This fucker just set the bar lower. Like, a lot lower. Hell, I don't even really know where to begin!

Street Trash is fairly infamous, and with good reason. I don't know what the shit they were thinking when they made it, but I can only guess that Munro and crew got together and decided to make the most vile and unrespectable movie in history. Now, I haven't seen any of John Waters' early work yet, but I think they certainly more or less achieved their goal.

Street Trash. Street Trash.... where to begin? It boggles the mind. The story loosely revolves around a liquor store owner who sells bottles of decades-old wine to a bunch of bums for one dollar a pop. But this wine is seriously fucked up, because if you drink it, you melt - you melt into piles of abstract expressionist dayglo crud that burn like Aliens blood. The cast of characters is mainly the sorriest bunch of filthy and sociopathic bums ever assembled, rounded out by sleazy mobsters, psychotic cops, lecherous junkyard owners, and headed by a demented vietnam war vet who looks like Zach Galifianakis if he just emerged from a septic tank. Evil Galifianakis (fine, his name is Bronson in the movie) rules over a sorry lot of hobos living in an automotive junkyard. Bronson is so fried from his tour of duty in Nam that he carries around a knife carved out of a human femur.

The narrative is a total mess. It's more of an amalgamation of variously funny and/or surprisingly disturbing set pieces. The humour frequently falls flat either due to poor acting or worse writing. However, my buddy Corey and I are connoiseurs of poor taste, so we found more than enough to amuse us. Frankly, I don't know a single person other than Corey that would want to watch Street Trash, so I couldn't really recommend it to a normal individual. It crosses so many boundaries that I don't know what the fuck... It's racist, misogynistic, there's a scene where all the bums play catch with a severed penis, there's a scene which implies the gang rape of a drunk bimbo by a mob of homeless guys followed by (implied) necrophilia with same bimbo after her body washes up on shore (going rather too far for even our depraved sensibilities), there's a crapload of people melting and exploding, a cop beating a guy to death and then vomitting on his corpse... look, I don't think I really need to go on. Anyway, that's the worst of it.

I guess I really had no idea what I was getting into here. The thing is, the whole movie is so knowingly ridiculous and over-the-top, it's impossible to seriously allege that it is actually racist or misogynistic or anything else for that matter. But Street Trash is so relentlessly lowbrow that it actually ventures into twisted surrealism at times. Nowhere is this more evident than Bronson's messed up and jarringly serious Vietnam flashbacks. The film could not in any way be called political, but these scenes, the dismal urban landscapes, and the overwhelming nihilism on display certainly give what would otherwise be goofy horror schlock a dark and sometimes sinister atmosphere. In fact, it's somewhat puzzling. You almost think that there's some evil intent beneath the surface of Street Trash - it's just that, nobody would ever give it enough credit to search for it.

My favourite movies are more along the lines of Solaris, Lawrence of Arabia, and The Third Man. In this lofty company, Street Trash can only look like what it is - an amateurish, sordid affair; but it's certainly a true original. In any case, I couldn't recommend it to anybody other than trash culture junkies.

A well-earned 3.7