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Street Trash (1987)

Dir: Jim Muro

The big city…The bad, stinky, greasy, dusty, sleazy, nasty and oh so mean big city…
Bums and psychos inhabit the streets and no good citizen is safe as mad shapes in rags squeegee your car to death.

So many bums, so little time (as the Priest said to The Pope) so lets concentrate these bums down into a manageable group.
First we have Fred (Mike Lackey) and his younger brother Kevin (Mark Sferrazza) who hang out around the scrap yard of the sleazy Mr. Schnizer (R. L. Ryan).
Fred is always getting into trouble and trying to make an easy buck the hard way and so he and Kevin don’t get on, Kevin though finds solace in the arms of Wendy (Jane Arakawa), Schnizer’s hard done by office girl.

The area is basically run by deranged Vietnam vet Bronson (Vic Noto) who sits on his throne of junk ruling over his men and his best boney gal Winette (Nicole Potter) with his many scary outbursts and flashbacks.
When Fred rips off some of some of his street cash though Bronson is determined to squash him to a smelly pulp.

Meanwhile hard ass detective Bill James (Bill Chepil) patrols the streets with his fists and his scowl looking for a chance to take Bronson down while at the same time trying to keep track of all the muggings, rapes and random ass-kickings that befall the good folks while also trying to keep an eye on local mob bigshot Mr. Duran (Tony Darrow).
But if all that wasn’t enough Detective Bill is suddenly hit by another mystery when some of the bums suddenly started melting…..!

Lets get some things out of the way first dear readers…Yes ”Street Trash” is lots of fun and has some genuine 'wow' moments, but it's also sadly not the film it could have been.
Running at least 10 minutes too long it suffers from a pretty tiring first 40 minutes as the screenplay (by Roy Frumkes, he of the Romero “Document of the Dead” documentary) tries to keep track of so many characters and subplots while the dialogue tries to keep track of your ears due to the lousy sound recording.



There is simply too much going on here, not that ambition is a bad thing, and as such the film starts off full of ‘things’ but lacks any real, gripping, incident.
Proceedings are not helped by the sad conclusion we have to face that despite what he may think…Roy Frumkes is not John Waters.
Where Frumkes' actual dialogue is used (sometimes the actors would change words and even improvise heavily), in many of the dialogue heavy scenes which follow numerous bums around during the day, the film is obviously trying to redo much of that superlative work done by Waters in the likes of “Desperate Living“ and “Pink Flamingos“ (where, as in “Street Trash” and its famous killer ‘Viper’ wine that melts you to death idea, much of the running time in a Waters‘ film concentrates on the character’s daily routine more than the main plot) but he lacks that astute ear for the grotesque, the absurd and even the sublime that Waters has (or at least had, today even John Waters can’t do John Waters) and he most certainly does not have the sheer joyous, wondrous, scale of unique thespian talent to work with (for the most part) that Waters had to make many of these scenes welcome and fascinating even if the plot stands still while they play out.

Thankfully though things magically improve just before the half way mark as the sound recording improves (nothing worse than tying to work out badly delivered dialogue that sounds like it’s coming from inside a pillow case), the sleaze gets upped, the action and grue get upped and those Frumkes penned, sub-Waters, ‘bums just mumbling’ set-pieces almost vanish to be replaced by vastly superior work by the actors themselves. More on that later.
With endless introductions now out of the way the plot can settle down to incident after incident that sees much of the promise of the film’s set-up finally come to fruition.

The melting effects improve a great deal too later on (whereas the first half of the film is not helped in the fact the first melt death, despite being the most famous due to it’s toilet setting, is the weakest as it lacks the blood and flesh additions to the melting person that add punch to later melts and instead has multi-coloured goo only, and a really dire end ‘shock’ effect that looked naff even in 1987) and there are some real classic gore and splat moments here that still hold up today and are just as much sickening fun as they ever were.
This is truly disgusting stuff and Frumkes and Muro obviously love it as much as they know we will love it. And that’s a whole hell of a lot!

Comedy and drama sometimes mix badly here though and the Kevin and Wendy characters are quite frankly dull and this ‘serious social issue’ part of the plot does not hang well at all with out and out carnivale grotesque scenes like that of a bum (otherwise with no ill-effects) trying to catch his (rather impressive in size) severed penis as it gets tossed around the junkyard by the other homeless guys like a frisbee.

Another controversial moment of that sudden shift away from cartoon goofiness and grossness to out and out serious nastiness is during a murder/gang rape (actual assault off-screen) where suddenly those silly, silly, oh so silly bums become (and are filmed as) slavering night creatures who, after watching Fred virtually 'date rape' the drunken woman with salivi dripping joy, drag her off screaming into the darkness to her fate (screaming very well because the actress herself started having flashbacks to the time she was really, brutally, attacked on the subway!), her nudity wantonly displayed for all to see.
That she is then later violated even in death is the putrid cherry on the top of the turd cake.
It’s a genuinely unsettling and uncomfortable sequence (though superbly crafted and shot, as indeed is much of the night time cinematography) that works very well as full-on exploitation, but again sits a bit strangely with the penis frisbee shenanigans and the otherwise goofy 'n' gormless portrait of the bums.
But Muro and Frumkes wanted to keep the audience on their toes and off balance…and as far as that endeavour goes the scene is a great success.

Where a bit of seriousness does actually work though is in the Bronson character (during his ‘Nam flashback moments) and a later melting where the character’s demise is actually played as a more unpleasant tragedy than popcorn erupting crowd pleaser.

Talk of Bronson also beings up the acting and the highlights there of.
As the aforementioned nutty ‘Nam man Bronson, Vic Noto is bags of fun. His out of control rants are a marvel and his facial contortions mix perfectly with his line delivery.
This is one scary guy!
As his long suffering squeeze, Minette, Nicole Potter is a revelation. Caring not one bit about how she looks she gives a genuinely barnstorming, and unflattering as hell, performance as her character (dressed in the world’s least sexy, utterly filthy, underwear and caked in dust and grime) screeches her defiance at Bronson and cackles at other’s misfortunes. She essays one of trash cinema's most memorable characters ever in fact

Also of note is ex-Cop (now a born again Christian no freakin’ less) Bill Chepil as the Detective.
With the angriest face in movies he thuds his way through the plot and the bums with great vigour but manages to make this uncompromising steel fist of justice a really likeable character who does deep down actually care about what happens to even those bums that get bashed on by the likes of Bronson.
His coup de grace after he beats a would-be hitman to a pulp is unlike anything you’ve seen a Cop do in a film either (or in real life one hopes) and we can only give praise he found Jesus after he shot this scene.
Sadly though he does get rather mishandled and matter of factly screwed over by the screenplay near the end.
No one else really sticks out in the main cast, but all give at least average performances and certainly give it their all.

But the real highlight, among these highlights, are two sub-plot characters and actors that really have no baring on the main plot at all.
They are Tony Darrow’s (a club singer who would later pop up in “Goodfellas”) Mr Duran and the vastly underrated James Lorinz’ (“Frankenhooker”) restaurant doorman who butt heads throughout the film.
Improvising much of their dialogue and exchanges (some great moments of which were not used but pop up in the very excellent ‘Meltdown Memoirs’ documentary on the DVD) they make what could be two annoying guys (because they take us out of the main plot and away from the main characters) instead turn out to be the greatest bits of non-melting entertainment in the movie.
The riffed back and forth insults and wonderfully unique New York attitude and line delivery work beautifully and it is with great wisdom that (as they finally manage to join the rest of the plot) they are the two characters who end the film and Lorinz especially goes all out with is dialogue.

“Street Trash” failed to really find its audience when first released and I think it’s because of the constant shift in style and attitude and the flabby, often dull as hell, first half that needed some major fixing.
But today it has a strong cult reputation and yes it does ultimately deserve that reputation thanks to the vastly superior last 50 minutes and for all the far-out, blood and gunk drenched, improvised dialogue, wonderment, the sometimes very strong performances and way out ideas that more often than not succeed.



I mean it has two climaxes that feature the best of both trash movie worlds; Blood and great dialogue.
One is a groovy bit of gore involving a smashed torso and severed head and one is groovy bit of word-play that ties up the Lorinz/Darrow sub-plot to ironic perfection.
So what the hell…go slumming with that “Street Trash”.