Street Trash / Joe Bob's Last Drive-In
Wow, so many things to say. So I have seen this in the 90s and early 2000s. I was introduced to it through a comedy show featuring two hosts with a small studio audience cracking wise while offering clips of gory sequences from 80s horror. Back then researching horror films wasn't so easy and information not as accessible. And I wasn't of the age to rent gross, purposely vile, crudely profane, disgustingly filthy horror films depicting human bodies dissolving into multi-colored globs of blobby goo.
Why I think films like this are so fascinating is because they are so offensive and display so much censorship material. I often wonder if there will come a time when the Censorship Police will eliminate anything remotely as yikes as "Street Trash" (1987), a film shot in some really unflattering areas of NYC with some downtrodden, unwashed, down-on-their-luck alley-and-junkyard sidewalk-lounging derelicts who would be cleared out by law enforcement if the Oscars red carpet Hollywood's Elite were to arrive at a venue. In 2021, the homeless population rising, it looks as if 1980s New York is making a comeback to all big cities. Maybe they aren't as psychotic as Bronson, with his sharpened femur bone (supposedly cut from the leg of a Vietnamese soldier during that conflict) and grotesquely skinny bra-and-panties squeeze (who just looks as if she has been starved, without a bath in quite a while), or Fred (Mike Lackey), with a chest layered in black metal dust and sidewalk dirt anytime his ragged shirt is unbuttoned. You get homeless derelicts like Morty Storm in a suit with a giant tear down a pants leg and plentiful other holes and tears all throughout his coat and shirt...his mouth has few teeth left, with those remaining tinged in a distinctive yellow. Morty tries to explain to a liquor store owner how he ended up on the street, losing all he had due to a bad decision...too bad he bought some Viper and melted while relaxing on an outer building's stairs into yellow corn-like mix that drops onto a businessman, causing that poor guy (just passing through with friends/co-workers) to perish as his face mangles into a smoky acid bath. Eddie Bay doesn't fare much better as he takes a swig of the Viper toxic brew and explodes after his already bulbous stomach inflates and bursts resulting in a grandiose geyser of meaty smoking bits and pieces far-reaching into the street and on cars several feet in front of where he once sat. Miriam Zucker -- who is found by Lackey's Fred in an alley quite intoxicated -- has no idea she will be met with a junkyard congruence of dirty vagrants converging on her after Fred deposits her practically naked body (how her dress and undergarments come off is really hard for me to watch, enough so I just turned away in horror and discomfort) out of disinterest! Zucker's fate when Troma's own Pat Ryan (as a junkyard operations manager, Frank Schnizer) finds her dead naked body dropped at the bank of a pond on his property is further proof that the screenplay for "Street Trash" just couldn't give two shits about any redeeming value by that point. I guess when a compressor tank is set off by Fred's younger brother, Kevin (Mark Sferrazza), blasting off like a missile that takes the head off Bronson, resulting in this u-shaped wound that squirts gushing inner juices, while displaying bloody viscera (you can see the head eventually fall after taking a brief flight, with the director making it a point to show the eyes moving back and forth as the mouth is fixed in a frozen expression), there is no amount of yucky those behind the making of "Street Trash" won't pursue. It really feels like no holds barred in this film. It is just guerrilla, all-bets-are-off filmmaking that nobody in America would probably even consider trying to get away with today. Some of the dialogue alone would get the "Nope, No way" seal of disapproval. How Frank talks to his secretary, Wendy (Jane Arakawa), in such degrading, puerile language, even falling on her, at one point, when he wants to molest her -- she tries to reach for a phone and it seems quite uncomfortably long -- there is no fucking way that would ever be attempted in this country anymore, unless it was an activist, political protest against that kind of horrible behavior. But in 1984 -- when this was actually shot -- there weren't as many restraints on what you could and couldn't do. Quite frankly, I'm surprised Shudder was even allowed to air this or "Cannibal Holocaust" for that matter. I reckon there will be a time when that won't be the case.
I watched the Joe Bob Briggs Last Drive-In presentation of the film, just so I could get some breaks from it with his commentary on back story involving those who made and acted in "Street Trash". Almost the entire cast never starred in another film besides "Street Trash". I have no idea where Muro found some of the people that occupies his film. I'm guessing he just found a bunch of them around the city and cast them. He has quite a dumpy background with a portion of NYC very familiar to fans of "C.H.U.D." I guess, considering the film was shot in 1984, Muro could just point his camera wherever he needed, getting coverage from a time viewed as a historical document of sections of city a mayor and counsel might wish had remained out of sight, out of mind.
Nonetheless, what "Combat Shock" (1986) isn't able to convey about parts of New York (Staten Island), "Street Trash" more than makes up for. Mounds of cars and car parts serve as a place of refuge for those homeless derelicts discarded by society to rot and decay in their own filth and mental decline. Among all the gruesome setpieces, there is "grocery shopping" with Burt (Clarenze Jarmon), as he goes from one aisle to the next filling his baggy pants with food products (such as chicken, lots of Perdue chicken) until an elderly shopper snitches on him to a clerk who demands he follow him to the front to speak with a supervisor as a means of comedy, not to mention, the "penis football" where Bronson isn't happy being pissed on, cleaving off a bum's member, throwing it to a member of his bum entourage (resulting in other bums playing keepaway!). There is a "hooker van" where law enforcement gather up arrested streetwalkers for jail, a debt-collector bum for Bronson cleaned up by Bill the Cop as punishment (!) for not snitching on his boss, a liquor store owner disinterested and frustrated in the sheer amount of bums entering and exiting during the day, and lots of cool steadicam from the very talented director who shoots a ton of energized follow-the-action sequences on streets, fluidly and at even significant length. Muro covers a lot of space, his camera sometimes moving blocks. Fred snatching a liquor bottle and debt money, trying to avoid angry folks out to get their pound of flesh, running for his life for quite a distance sets the stage for just how effective the steadicam is.
***Something that came to me after dropping the review: Bob the Cop parking his car, with a closeup of his determined eyes, preparing to face off with the Big Bad in Bronson is very Wild West showdown in it's presentation. Except this time the Big Bad is victor. The almighty cop can't leave the premises with himself intact. Bronson was ready for him.***
Let's see: 2/5 thereabouts.
February 27, 2007 (slightly edited)
If ever a film appropriately fit the description of it's title, this film is it. The proprietor of a liquor store finds a crate of bottled liquid appropriately titled "Viper" and boy does it poison! The bums seem to gravitate towards the green bottle smiling wide that they are about to guzzle free booze and never even imagine they are gulping down liquid that acidifies their insides turning them into human paint.
There's a nasty piece of work named Bronson(Vic Noto), a volatile Vietnam vet who carries a femur he cut from a Vietnamese officer, prone to traumatic flashbacks. The film focuses mainly on brother bums who live in a junkyard with other winos who I felt were photographed at night as very gremlin-like. You have a minor sub-plot about an Italian restaurateur whose girlfriend is taken off with one of the bums to the junk yard(..she has no idea who it is carrying her or where she's going, the woman's so wasted)where she will be assaulted and raped by those gremlin bums. Anyway, the film is all over the place. Partially it focuses on those who turn into goo when they drink the Viper. You have Bill the Cop who decides he'll take out Bronson himself(..paying the price for entering another man's lair). Bill the Cop never quite recovers when Bronson breaks off the sharpened femur bone in his back. You have Bronson, whose Vietnam nightmares are exploited. But, what seems to linger throughout is the human comedy played out exploiting homelessness.
It's vulgar, tasteless, disgusting, nasty, loud, & filthy. It's the antithesis of political correctness. I've never seen so many bums in one movie, all bathed gloriously in caked dirt, mouthing off obscenities gleefully.
Among the bizarre graphic bits include the infamous castrated penis toss, the human melting, a hit-man being vomited on, a Vietnamese man's leg being torn away, a woman being dragged into the darkness(bush exposed)by the gremlin bums, a portly junkyard manager trying in various ways to bed his employee, amongst other things. But, the film's bread and butter is the human melting.
This is how I sum up the film best..You know the mildew which makes it's home in between the cracks of your bathroom tiles? That is what STREET TRASH is to the cinematic world.
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