Street Trash-Movie Review

Street Trash

Dir. Jim Muro
1987 35mm 102 min. unrated

Street Trash is a B-movie version of Kurosawas Dodes Ka-den directed by the recently born-again Jimmy Muro and produced by horror enthusiast and Document of the Dead director Roy Frumkes.

When liquor store owner Ed finds some ancient hooch in his basement, he decides to make some easy money off the neighborhood bums by selling it for $1 a bottle. They eat it up.

And it, in turn, eats them up -- a low rumble in the stomach turns to a churning gas, followed by dissolving tissue and finally, a full-on technicolor bodily explosion! Good-guy low-life Freddy tries to warn the others who inhabit the junkyard about the perils of ingesting the enticingly cheap 'Viper', but not before stopping to piss off a Mob Boss Nick "the dick" Duran (played by real life mafia sidekick Tony Darrow), rape a drunk chick, and coming close to death at the hands of the sociopathic Vietnam Vet Bronson- who rules the junkyard.

But gripping plot and character aside, what has made this movie a classic are the gleefully disgusting FX by Jennifer Aspinall -- decapitations, castrations, bodies melting and exploding and a great scene where a cop deliberately pukes on a guy's head after beating him senseless. To add even more to an essentially flawless exploitation movie is the great comic performance of James Lorinz (Frankenhooker) as the cocky doorman

Kier-La Janisse

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