Street Trash (1987) Revisited – Horror Movie Review

The Revisited series looks back at the 1987 horror comedy Street Trash, a story of bad booze and slimy meltdowns

I mention a lot in these video essays about remakes and how they sometimes work but often times don’t. One of the biggest issues I have is that many of the remakes we get are really not needed. I like them but did we really need an updated version of Friday the 13th, Halloween, or Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Of course not, these are classics for a reason. Those are just the ones that work too, there’s plenty like Jacob’s Ladder, Nightmare on Elm Street, or Poltergeist that run the gamut from boring as hell to offensively bad. Well, in 2024 I’m kind of getting my wish. While something like Fade to Black could get a wonderful update 44 years later and be able to say something new and different, I’m curious what a Street Trash remake will bring to the table. The original is one that was a 42nd Street staple and as gross and straightforward as the title suggests. It’s shockingly competently made with a lot of fun to be had and it’s time to get a revisit of its own.

Street Trash is one of those movies that I saw black and white photos of in horror reference books. For the longest time, I thought it was a Troma movie and while it sure as hell shares a lot of what that studio offers, it was a one-off production of Lightning Pictures, which would eventually be absorbed by the infamous Vestron. Back when I was fresh out of high school but still working at Blockbuster, I didn’t have a lot to spend my money on. Thankfully there was a store on Beach Blvd in Huntington Beach called DVD Planet. The website still exists but this was like finding a lost city. Just aisles and aisles of DVD and maybe some early Blu-ray and HD-DVD if you remember that short lived platform. I picked up movies sight unseen all the time from foreign classics that id only heard about to stuff that Blockbuster wouldn’t carry. I bought Salo and Cannibal Holocaust as my exposure to those and then one day I saw the 2005 Synapse release of Street Trash and the memories of those pictures came flooding back.

I bought it and went immediately home to watch it. It was pretty much exactly what I thought it would be and simultaneously like nothing I’d ever seen before. Even though I kept the DVD I’d bought, I didn’t watch it again for almost 15 years when Joe Bob Briggs hosted it on The Last Drive In. It still holds up. It’s vile, low budget, dumb as hell but also shot nicely with some really cool takes, has fantastic gore effects, and its stupidity makes it infinitely watchable when you just want to turn your brain off. Like the movies of Frank Henenlotter where this would fit nicely in a movie marathon with, many of the actors are only known for this. In fact, if you look on their imdb pages, their pictures are just stills from this frickin movie. That being said, the performances of Bill the cop looking to solve the murders and the delightfully unhinged homeless veteran that owns a scrap heap as his kingdom named Bronson are delightful. Bill Chepil, who plays the cop was an actual police officer before and Vic Noto who plays Bronson was hired 12 hours before shooting began and claims he never read the script. It’s a cool story that I’m actually half inclined to believe.

The main star of the story is Tenafly Viper, the old wine that a liquor store owner finds in a crate buried in the wall and decides to sell it to his homeless vagrants for a buck. The wine has gone bad, REAL bad, and when people start drinking it, they melt or explode or both! The writer of the movie made a short film first which was a lot smaller, we will get to the added plot points aplenty later and was able to get it made into a feature later. This writer named Roy Frumkes is also famous for doing a famous horror documentary called Document of the Dead that follows Romero’s first two Dead films. He did some other stuff too like being an executive producer on the remake and as an actor in this movie as a businessman who suffers from melt collateral damage.

The director of the movie who was also the lead camera guy is named J. Michael Muro, and that name may not jump out to you, but you’ve seen his work. Not as a director probably, though he did do a lot of TV work after this, but no, the dude is a legend behind the camera. A regular surgeon with it. Specifically, as a steady cam operator, director of photography, and cinematographer. His list includes Horizon: An American Saga from this year, Heat, Casino, and Jason Takes Manhattan. These two men combined made a hell of a trashy picture and it is also purportedly based on the writer watching Dodeskaden, ya know, a Kurosawa movie, which is about as far from Street Trash as it gets.

The movie does technically have a story, or multiple stories actually. You have the inciting incident with the liquor store getting the Viper drink and one of our two main homeless guys getting ahold of it. You have the main star of the show with the Viper itself turning the homeless population into melty goo, the cop who is assuming these deaths are murders and investigating, the mob boss’s girlfriend getting attacked and consequences from his group, the auto yard hosting the junkyard, and the aforementioned Vietnam vet slum lord psychopath who rules with a femur hammer. The movie doesn’t really have a story which tracks as it came from a short film and its really a series of short vignettes that are loosely connected by a few characters and geography. Does that matter? Not at all because the movie has charm.

Some of the shots are deliriously fun like when Bronson pulls a poor guy out of a car and swings him onto his own trunk, and we see a cool shot from his or at least his glasses point of view. Another fun early shot is when the main homeless guy enters the liquor store, and it switches to a fast-moving camera of his excitement. There’s an all-out brawl between Bronson and the cop that is outrageous and fun in a similar way that the They Live fight is. The acting isn’t good or even acting for the most part and the only actor that I’ve even seen anywhere else is the owner of the junkyard who also happens to be the slimy mayor from The Toxic Avenger. See, it’s all coming around. While the movie doesn’t have a lot of information on it online, there’s a wealth of info and behind the scenes stuff on the DVD release including Meltdown Memoirs which is a documentary by the same creator as the movie.

Fred, who is about as much of a protagonist as we are going to get, almost dies from Viper intake multiple times until he figures out what exactly it is and actually weaponizes it. The near misses don’t really create any tension but instead act almost like slapstick or even silent movie gags. My favorite part of the movie is the fact that the Viper concoction doesn’t kill anyone the same way twice. It melts some, implodes others, and one bum even explodes after drinking it. You’d think that the main villain of the movie Bronson would go out using Viper, but he doesn’t. the Viper itself could have ended up being an end of the world type drink that had commentary on New York in the mid 80s and used to clean it up but its made more of a side story with how ridiculous and over the top the Bronson junkyard angle is.

The music, sound effects, visual effects, and direction/camera work more than make up for what Street Trash lacks. Its elevated above shot on video stuff like Things or Sledgehammer and I would argue its better made than a lot of Troma stuff that seems to be shoveled out in the same vein as Roger Corman movies. It wasn’t a big studio movie or even one that got lost with a dozen other releases in the same year as it might have with a Full Moon. It played in midnight shows and across the grimy theaters of LA and New York but doesn’t have the same popularity as a Basket Case or Toxic Avenger. Those that have seen it are big fans and without a big release from Scream Factory, Vinegar Syndrome, or Severin Films, it remains somewhat obscure. Even With the Joebob episode shining a light on it, that has been lost in the shuffle with The Last Drive In having over 100 episodes.

The tone is always consistently silly, but some scenes jump out. How can a Vietnam flashback and exploding winos be in the same movie as gassy and fart noises, a love story between a homeless guy and a shop worker, and a murder case. They can’t and shouldn’t be, but it works. Everything culminates when a couple of the story lines, and I use that term very loosely, come together with Freds brother Kevin and Wendy being chased by Bronson for….reasons. Bronson has become a full-blown slasher villain now using a bone from the cop as his new weapon. Remember when I said that Bronson doesn’t meet his end via Viper? That’s because the brothers use an air canister to decapitate him like he’s a final boss at the end of a resident evil game.

I know this review has been all over the place and that’s ok, so is the movie. There really is no coherent plot to break down or even follow. You aren’t watching Street Trash for the story. You are watching and rewatching it because its absurd and fun and dumb. Its gore was more popular overseas, but it’s found its niche and is a pass along title that those who have seen get to initiate others into the club. I don’t care if the new movie has a more coherent story or if it wants to say something important. I just hope it has fun and tries to out do the gore of the original movie. It doesn’t matter if its bad or good though because the original will always hold a special place in horror fans hearts.

Two previous episodes of Revisited can be seen below. To see more of our shows, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals channel – and subscribe while you’re at it!