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Released by: Synapse Films
Released on: 8/31/2005
Director: James Muro
Cast: Mike Lackey, Bill Chepil, Marc Sferrazza, Jane Arakawa, Nicole Potter, Pat Ryan
Year: 1987
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The Movie:
Somewhere in the ghettos of New York City, a low rent liquor store sells cheap booze to the homeless population that thrive in the area and call the nearby junkyard home. When the owner of the store decides to clean the place up for once, he pulls open a vent at the back of the store and comes across a long forgotten box of a mysterious liquor adorned with labels declaring it to be “Tenefly Viper.†Without so much as a second thought about what this stuff might really be, he decides to unload it on the derelicts in the area at a rock bottom price - anything to make a buck, right?
Cut to three young men living in the aforementioned junkyard who have run away from home - Fred (Mike Lockey), his younger brother Kevin (Bill Chepil) and their good buddy Burt (Clarenze Jarman). Unfortunately for these three guys, the junkyard that makes their abode is watched over by an insane Viet Nam vet named Bronson (Vic Noto) who shakes down some of the weaker and more timid bums for money to spend on booze.
Fred heads on over to the liquor store one day and without even a dollar to his name, he manages to pick up a bottle of the Tenefly Viper using the ol' five finger discount. Before Fred gets a chance to chug down his new found bottle of booze, it's stolen from him by a bum he stops to talk to on the way back home. The theif runs off with the booze and heads on into an abandoned building to get away from it all and enjoy a little sip while he drops his pants and sits down on the toilet to do what nature told him he should do. Rather than be treated to a relaxing and boozy bowel movement, after a swig or two he starts to convulse and soon after that, he body starts to melt and eventually he finds himself a new home in the sewers of the city.
As more and more of the homeless population are exposed to the cheap booze available at their local liquor store, more people wind up dead and soon enough the police are called in to investigate things. An aggressive and none too smart cop named Bill takes on the case but he's clueless as to why bums are exploding into gooey messes. To make matters worse, the mob gets involved in the whole mess and things get about as complicated as you'd expect them to when you've got an overload of whacked out characters running around and exploding as you do here.
Street Trash is a mess from start to finish - a big, ugly, multicolored mess of a film - and I love every second of it. Street Trash is the greatest Troma movie ever made, though Troma had nothing to do with it. All the gleeful mayhem and tasteless sex, violence, gore and crass humor usually associated with Lloyd Kaufman and company's better films is in this one in spades and the whole thing is one big exercise in bad taste but it's so much fun and the gore comes so fast and in such a plentiful quantity that it's hard not to love it. At times it's reminiscent of Peter Jackson's first few films - it goes for the lowest common demoninator and it hits it dead in the eye in much the same way that Bad Taste does, and in fact, it easily tops it.
Highlights of the film include some bums playing football with a man's severed unit, the toilet explosion, vomiting cops, sex with a woman covered in puke, and all manner of bums dissolving and/or exploding into piles of human goo.Written by Roy Frumkes of Document Of The Dead fame, the story wisely decides to emphasize the shock value of its set pieces rather than rely on the cast of more or less unknown (and inexperienced) performers to deliver the goods. Acting isn't the film's strong point, nor is the dialogue or the plot development - watch this one for the gore. Speaking of the gore, the make up effects, when you take into account the low budget with which the film was made, are actually pretty solid. None of them are really all that realistic but the suit the over the top comic book gone bad tone of the movie very well and the filmmaker's certainly spared no expense when it came to the oozing bodily fluids and exploding appendages used throughout the film.
Directed with a reasonable amount of style by Jim Muro (who would later move to Hollywood where he'd work as a on such blockbusters as Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Chronicles Of Riddick, Casino and X-Men 2 as a steadi-cam operator), Street Trash is low budget shlock at it's best. Presented here in it's most complete form with a one hundred and two minute running time, the film never feels padded or slow and there's always enough going on, even if it doesn't always make sense, to ensure that the film is consistently entertaining and a whole lot of big dumb fun.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Synapse has restored Street Trash from it's original negative for this brand new high definition 1.78.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. While previous releases have been presented fullframe, the compositions look fine on this DVD and the increase in clarity and picture quality from this disc compared to earlier releases from various formats is like comparing day and night. The colors on this transfer are gorgeous, the hues of red and orange and green during the more sickly scenes are phenomenal in their vibrancy and the black levels are dead on. While there is still some film grain present, it's never problematic or distracting and pretty much any trace of print damage has been cleaned up and eliminated from this release. The original aspect ratio for the film's theatrical exhibition was 1.85.1 but this slightly more open transfer, which was personally approved by Roy Frumkes himself, looks just fine in terms of picture information and the like. As much of a cliché as it might be, seeing the film on this DVD was like seeing it again for the first time - the picture quality is that good.
The Dolby Digital Mono sound mix is perfectly clean and clear, considerably more so than the Dragon DVD release (which sounded fine, just not quite as nice as this one). Dialogue is pain free in terms of clarity and comprehension and the sound effects come through with a sufficient amount of 'eeeewwwww' to them that make the viewing experience a little more fun. This is a low budget film and it still sounds that way even on this fancy remastered edition, but the clarity is improved over the previous DVD release and there are no problems with the mix.
As has been stated, this single disc edition is a precursor to the two disc special edition that will be coming out a few months from now. As such, it's being released at a lower price point and with less on the disc in terms of extra features. However, the release is not completely barebones - Mike Felsher provides some interesting liner notes, the film's original theatrical trailer is included on the disc, and inside the keepcase you'll find a couple of Viper Tenefly stickers that you can use to make your own lethal booze (stick it over the label of your favorite bottle and act out scenes from the film with your friends)! These stickers are exclusive to this single disc release and will not be included with the double disc set. On a semi-related note, the menus are pretty nice and that cover art flat out rocks.
The Final Word:
Fruegal fans will likely want to avoid the double dip and wait for the upcoming two disc set that Synapse will be releasing soon but for those of you who can't wait, there are certainly worse things to spend your money on. Street Trash is about as fun as a horror movie should ever be able to get and the new and improved transfer on this release kicks all kinds of ass.