Roy Frumkes

(In French, On Cable TV, October 2020) Part of the fun of Street Trash is discovering how truly insane the film is willing to become, but for everyone else who may want some advance notice, be warned that in some circles the film is considered a masterpiece of the “melt movies” subgenre. You shouldn’t have asked what those are, because now you’re cursed with the knowledge that there are people out there seeking films in which people, well, melt. We’re not talking climactic melting à la Raiders of the Lost Ark: we’re talking about films in which people’s bodies graphically melt down through some horrific mean. In chunks. So it is that in Street Trash, we find ourselves among the homeless of Brooklyn, as a case of old booze is sold to those who can’t afford any better, and they dissolve in colourful pools of goo. The poster is terrible enough, but the film itself is a carnival of vomit-inducing liquefaction, and that’s not even getting into the dirty atmosphere of the film in its entirety. Cheerfully racing past “gritty,” “grimy” and “dirty” as adjectives, Street Trash is simply visually filthy: every scene, every costume, every character has dirt, grease, human fluids or liquid goop attached to them. Abstractly, it sounds terrible, maybe even unbearable—I certainly would not recommend the result to anyone without a strong stomach and a tolerance for the kind of dark humour that genre 1980s horror could dive into. But on the screen, the result is so consciously over-the-top that liquefying hobos have never been so, well, funny. It’s still stomach-churning, but it’s not nearly as hollow as it could have been—and scenes in which street bums play around with a dismembered phallus are, well, curiously tolerable once you play into the film’s twisted logic. Obviously made by director J. Michael Muro and screenwriter-producer Roy Frumkes to freak out the mundanes, Street Trash remains, even today, the kind of film that becomes part of every twisted horror cinephile’s conversational repertory: “Oh, you think that’s bad, but have you seen…?” It’s definitely one of those movies that has to be seen to be believed. But if you show it to friends, you’re responsible for providing the barf bags.