It’s hot, sticky and
filthy – so what better way to celebrate a month of the Toronto 2009 garbage strike
than with one of the dirtiest movies ever made: Street Trash. And by “dirty,” I mean literally dir-ty. The 1987 film is part of a
strange, small sub-set of low-budget splatter films from the ‘80s that
portrayed NYC as a crime and garbage-ridden hellhole – and hammered that worm
into the Big Apple with a crass cocktail of violence, nudity, urban decay,
mutants, black humour and gooey gore effects. Street Trash’s bad brethren include The Toxic Avenger, Slime City,
Brain Damage and Basket Case – films that took the city’s bad reputation at the time
(before Guliani brought in reforms), inflated it and turned it into an
aesthetic.
If you think the site of an over-ripe City of Toronto garbage bin is
gross, well, you can practically see the stink-lines coming off J. Michael
Muro’s Street Trash.
It was shot in a
decaying, crime and vandalism-ravaged section of Brooklyn
and concerns a group of grimy, junkyard-dwelling hobos who do anything they can
to get drunk. Their daily routines of scamming people, scamming each other,
talking about their scams, getting pie-eyed, giving and receiving beatings and not showering, are interrupted when a
liquor store owner discovers a dusty case of booze, called Viper, hidden behind
his basement wall. Never missing a chance to make a buck – literally – he sells
it to the hobos for a dollar a bottle. He doesn’t realize, though – until after
it’s way too late – that seconds after drinking it, it causing one to melt,
erupt and explode, in ways similar to the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark who didn’t get the safety memo about the
importance of never looking into an opened ark. Imagine a movie where that kind
of thing happens all the time, and in a wide variety of graphically disgusting
ways – notably a hobo dissolving into a runny mound of gunk inside an already
defiled toilet bowl – and you’ll start to understand exactly why Street Trash is a prince among sleaze.
It was written by Roy Frumkes, who’s also known for his
famous documentary about George A. Romero’s Dawn
of the Dead, called Document of the
Dead, and it’s obscenely hilarious gorefest. And it’s not just a series of
gore gags strung together either.
For starters, it’s full of colourful characters, such as the
young runaway who wants to better himself and falls in love with the scrap yard
manager; the crazed king of the hobos who sits on a throne made of an old car
seat and other crap and suffers homicidal ‘Nam flashbacks, a crazed gangster
looking for his moll (who has the misfortune of stumbling into the hobo
encampment), the violent, hard-assed cop investigating the bubbling body count,
and a mayor who can’t settle a garbage strike after a month. (Just kidding
about that last one – trying to keep things relevant...)
With greasy hobos having sex among the junk, more than one
sexual assault taking place, and a game of bum football played with a severed penis, Street Trash absolutely revels in both
literal and moral filth. It’s intentionally and gleefully repugnant, which
makes it so awfully enjoyable – like
a really good fart joke. (If you want to see for yourself, the film was
reissued a couple of years ago in a deluxe double-disc edition by Synapse and probably can be found at your local cult-movie friendly rental house.)
So, as we sit and stew in our own filth here in T.O., I’d
like to salute Street Trash for
reminding us that being durty sure ain’t purty, but sometimes you just gotta get down with the detritus.
-Dave Alexander
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