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Review

TLA Guide:
Entertaining and disgusting, Street Trash is not more than one step up from a student film, though it is competently made and has good production values considering its setting. The minimal story is about both a toxic brand of cheap liquor which melts its imbibers from the inside out and the gang rape and accidental murder of a mob boss' young mistress by the inhabitants of a junkyard. The movie has a guilty pleasure feel about it, from its well-done and completely disgusting special makeup effects to its gallows humor to its depiction of life in the seediest part of town.

Danger After Dark:
One of the more fondly remembered 1980s American indie gorefests, 1987’s Street Trash is, alas, perhaps better left as a fond memory for most viewers (personally, I was an unimpressed adolescent upon viewing then, and the intervening eighteen years of maturity haven’t changed that opinion much). While the fluid steadicam work (more on that in a moment) and accomplished – and admittedly enjoyably excessive – gore effects elevate the film slightly above the level of your average Troma “comedy,” the film shares the same lamentably mean-spirited, lowbrow sense of humor as the swill that emanates from that outfit, and would not seem out of place on their roster – and obviously that’s not intended as a compliment.

The thin storyline nominally concerns a liquor store owner’s discovery of a long-buried crate of “Viper” – a dirt-cheap wino hooch that winds up causing its imbibers to spectacularly melt and/or explode in a variety of colorful ways. Unfortunately, this vaguely promising premise is neglected for lengthy stretches of the film’s running time, and instead we are offered numerous sequences of unpleasant interactions between the denizens of the automotive junkyard where much of the story unfolds – director James Muro and writer/producer Roy Frumkes (a former School of Visual Arts instructor who taught the young Muro prior to the making of this film) have little investment in any three-dimensional characterization, and much of the action seems far too self-consciously designed to offend (unless you happen to genuinely find gang rape amusing, I suppose).

Street Trash seems to be the brainchild of Document of the Dead director Frumkes more than Muro, but the film’s leaden pacing and cheap shock tactics leave more than enough blame to go around. Muro never directed again, but went on to have an wildly successful career as one of Hollywood’s most in-demand steadicam operators (and, more recently, cinematographers), working for James Cameron, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, Kevin Costner, and Bryan Singer (who got his start as a grip on Street Trash). 80s gore films normally go down as smooth as old cognac, but Trash leaves a taste in one’s mouth far worse than any bottle of Viper.