Street Trash (1987)

Ed: "What the hell are you talking about? Just get your booze and get outta here."

By J. Michael Muro
With Mick Lackey, Bill Chepil and Vic Noto

After I watched The Toxic Avenger (1984), I was browsing through similar movies on IMDb and Street Trash came up. I wasn't really pulled into it, but the cover looked so amazing--it actually looked like some of Iron Maiden's 80's album covers, just with more gore.

Street Trash brings the spectator to a dirty world, at the back of a car demolition center where a bunch of bums live, drinking being their one and only distraction. There lives Freddie with his brother Kevin. Freddie buys a bottle of Viper, but he gets robbed off by another bum, yet the spectator sees the thief drinking it and he starts to dismantle it in gory effusions of bright neon liquids. Life continues at the demolition center, with the police, the mob and all around criminals getting involved.

Street Trash doesn't seem to have a strong main topic and we follow the events without always an explanation. The really impressive parts of the movie are the death scenes, especially those involving the Viper: the bodies get bloated, torn or simply melt but the gore is somewhat relieved by the fact that we're not seeing red blood, we're seeing a ton of beautiful painting colors dripping. Then we see a severed organ, which looks like it's been burnt, but it's still in a very poetic deep blue. These scenes alone made the movie worth watching for me, really impressive job there.

The rest of the movie, unfortunately, does not live up to it. It has its funny moments, but they do get lost in the mass of events we have to follow at once. It's not a trauma and it doesn't feel as low budget as a trauma would, but the spirit is definitely the same, joke around, be stupid and add a ton of gratuitous gory violence.

I liked: The death scenes, especially the first, the toilet one. Completely immoral and politically incorrect.

I disliked: Lack of a central plot, no real beginning or end. Could have deserved better dialogues.

52/100
It's funny, if you like gore this is definitely worth watching. To reserve for horror buffs.