Review: "Street Trash (1987)"
It's hard to overstate just how much this movie is everything that everyone warned kids about New York in the 1980s. Not exactly propaganda, but damn close.
It's the mid-to-late 1980s, in New York. Nothing is good here, absolutely nothing. Homeless people roam the streets in packs. Most just pester and annoy folks unlucky enough to be in their path, but some will try to rob them, while others will just throw anyone, even if they're trying to be polite. Whatever money these vagrants can scrape together immediately goes towards the only thing they (apparently) care about: booze.
One liquor store, run by a true sleazeball named Ed, goes deep into his supply and finds a box of "Tenefly Viper" that is at least 60 years old and probably just as many years past its expiration date. He doesn't care. All he wants is money, and he knows that the hobos in his neighborhood will buy it, no questions. What he doesn't know, but his poor homeless customers are about to find out, is that the expired hooch will turn your guts inside out, literally.
The entire city isn't without some small semblance of virtue and decency. A cop by the name of Bill is trying to solve a murder. All he knows is that one of the local homeless population snapped and killed an innocent man. A woman working in a disgusting scrap yard by the name of Wendy is trying her best to take care of two homeless. She has given them shelter in the junkyard and checks on them to make sure that they are alright. Without her care, they would likely have been dead already. In a city seemingly full of evil and despair, these are the only two shining sources of light.
Street Trash takes some really wild and heavy swings during its short runtime. Trying to legit talk about the homeless problem, alcoholism, and trying to survive in a world totally against them. Capitalism and how it takes advantage of those less fortunate and desperate to just live. Then somewhere in that is literally a five-minute bit where a group of homeless people plays keep-away with a dudes severed dick while he pleads for them to put it on ice.
It feels like someone had grand ideas for a lot of different movie plots and either didn't know how, or didn't have the money to flesh them out into full movies on their own. It certainly isn't a horror movie, unless you just want to call it "body horror." There are some REAL despicable people in here too. The gang rape of a drunk girl. The attempted rape of Wendy, while constantly throwing racial slurs at her, who then goes on to rape a dead girl. Except for her and the aforementioned cop, almost no one else in the picture has any redeemable qualities.
I am very curious how a remake of this film would go. The majority of this film would not fly anymore, even in such a terrible setting. Do they have a dick-tossing scene? Do they address the painfully obvious PTSD that the one homeless guy is struggling with? I don't know, and frankly, I'm not sure I want to know. This all just feels like a movie made to scare literally everyone away from New York in the 80s. Like clowns abducting kids in white vans. Or drug dealers putting drugs in Halloween candy. All of it feels like something my mom would have told my sister and me to keep us out of the "bad part of town." Much like those stories, watch at your own risk, I guess.
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