Street Trash (1987)

This had been on my IMDB watch-list for at least ten years, before we finally turned it on the other night. To be fair, "the other night" was over three weeks ago now, so unfortunately this gem is already starting to fade from my mind. It was, however, quite entertaining; our movie criteria had been "something fun and 80's, with gore and a simple plot", and on that front, Street Trash delivered.

The premise is simple: a liquor store owner comes across a nondescript case of what appear to be liquor bottles in his cellar, labeled "Viper". Seeing an opportunity to profit from the large homeless population, he decides to sell it to the local hobos at $1 a bottle. Unbeknownst to him, the bottles are actually toxic waste.

We meet our homeless anti-hero, Fred (Mike Lackey), as he sneakily steals a bottle of Viper. The first-person camera angles in the beginning are well-done, and very typical of the era. Fred ends up being chased, and as it progresses, he accidentally wrongs more and more people along the way, leading to a comical mob on his heels. Fred appears to be a bit of a jokester, dressed like some sort of filthy poet-type with a velvet burgundy hat.

The view of the city is that it too is filthy, and overrun by bums. There is a good scene involving a few bums washing a car against the will of the young couple inside; "Bronson" (Vic Noto), a hulking Vietnam-vet bum emerges, and proceeds to yank a young man out of another car nearby. The camera work here is great, as the man's glasses move with the camera as his face gets smashed into a windshield.

Meanwhile, Fred has given his bottle of Viper to another bum, who slinks off to a mostly-mostly demolished building to drink it. Perched atop a toilet, the effects on the bum are pretty quick; he melts into a surprisingly decent-looking pile of blue paint.

As though the Viper isn't trouble enough for the local bums, Bronson appears to be prone to some pretty ridiculous war flashbacks, and bouts of murderous rage. Bill (Bill Chepil), a brash and avant garde cop, is hot on his trail, seeking to piece together these recent deaths.

Bill tries to get some intel out of a passing bum, who then promptly climbs a fire escape and opens his own bottle of Viper. He drops some good one-liners on a black cat observing him, before downing the bottle. The cat looks on indifferently, as the bum oozes and drips onto a business man passing below. The drippings here look like canned pineapple sauce, but in a good way. It would be unfair to say the effects in this movie are bad; I loved it.

A large number of the local bums populate a city junkyard. Bronson rules it and his rag-tag group of homeless vets, from atop his makeshift throne of trash, while Fred and his kid brother Kevin (Mike Sferrazza) try to lay low and avoid the junkyard's owner. Wendy (Jane Arakawa), an Asian employee of the junkyard, has taken to caring for the younger kids like Kevin. Fred doesn't seem to like it, and has a few choice words for Kevin; it is easy to say Street Trash is pretty racist, and the dialogue supports this, but there is a surprising underlying message in this movie. Fred opens up to Kevin about how he was too young to remember dealing with their father after he came home from the war, and was unable even to "watch Godzilla without yelling 'Gook alert'".

Fred and Kevin are products of the social effects of the Vietnam War, as are Bronson and the whole slew of other vets that came back too screwed up to reintegrate in society, and this movie highlights the lack of realistic support available to these individuals. They were greatly ignored and swept under the rug, to go live on the streets.

The middle of the movie is short on toxic waste deaths, but despite the depressing commentary on Post-Vietnam war era America, the comedy keeps rolling. It is hard to say whether they meant to make a social statement with this movie; one could argue the commentary is just there, like the vets and their families were, their situations so prevalent at the time that we are desensitized to it. The real focus here is probably the humor, and the excellent deaths.

Bronson does have a flashback/dream about the war, where he was apparently a big-shot soldier; some pretty stereotypical Vietcong vampires (as they are referred to in the credits, which are worth reading through) attack him. It is a pretty funny sequence, if not a little dark and offensive.

More humor: another bum, Ed (M. D'jango Krunch, is that his real name?), heads to a local store to steal some chicken; besides looking like James Harden, he drops some pretty racist comments to the store clerk after an old white lady rats him out. He asks the old lady if "this is junior high" since she is such a tattle-tale, before pulling a paper bag over his head, stomping through a front window, and waddling off down the street with raw chicken falling out of his pant-legs.

There is another good sequence, during which Fred comes across a very drunken woman on his way home. He takes her to the junkyard, where they have rough sex. Some other bums watch, before dragging her off to gang rape and kill her. She turns out to have been the girlfriend of a mob boss, which leads to a side plot with our overly zealous Bill the Cop and the doorman/kid that let Fred wander off with the girl. Again, some solid one-liners ensue.


Bill the Cop ends up having an inevitable show-down with Bronson, the human femur-bone knife wielding PTSD-having vet; this more-or-less sets off the chain of events that lead up to the finale.


A couple more good Viper fatalities play out, and someone gets his block knocked off by a pressurized air tank. It is hard to find fault with this movie, unless you hate profanity and the overblown racist tendencies of some 80s movies... watch it and see for yourself. If for no other reason, than to see Bronson hack off the weenie of a bum that almost pees on him, and the subsequent game of keep-away the bums play with it.

Apparently the writer, Roy Frumkes (who had a cameo as the melted businessman), wrote a memoir/making-of type film about Street Trash almost twenty years later, The Meltdown Memoirs. It's on my watchlist, we will see if I update this later.