Street Trash follows a filthy gang of malicious vagrants living at a dump that are dispatched one-by-one by a mysterious liquid disguised as booze. As each revolting alcoholic melts or explodes once consuming the substance known as Viper, one of the homeless and a rough detective begin to suspect something is wrong. It's hard to determine more of a plot than that.
Street Trash Retro Review
This movie feels like it was a horror parody before horror parody was a thing. It's like Hobo with a Shotgun that didn't know it was Hobo with a Shotgun. It almost feels like this movie decided halfway through that it was as bad as the garbage of its setting and decided to roll with it and embrace it.
The plot and acting are unsurprisingly secondary to the gore effects as "victims" (I put it in quotations as that implies they didn't deserve it) melt and explode in gruesome ways from drinking the Viper substance. It's really just dragging yourself along with the disgustingly repulsive people of the dregs of society until the next kill, seeing how creative the effects team would get with it.
The perspective treated on the homeless is nothing short of offensive, to the point that I assumed for the sake of the director's soul that it was a purposeful satire of our perspective on them as a culture. We show no respect to them and assume they are immoral, amoral and disposable. Dare I say it, but the movie makes you think about how far we are from actually thinking of vagrants in such a way.
Of course, this movie purposefully takes it way too far. The actors manage to butcher already terrible lines and the seemingly absent plot barely holds together any sense of cohesion between grisly deaths. The "villain" is on screen to do his misdeeds at will, with virtually no consequence to the Viper storyline. Even at the end, both elements feel completely disconnected and disjointed.
I don't want to give this film any credit that it was trying to achieve anything resembling a good film. It simply wasn't. That wasn't the point. Its exploitation style is achieved thoroughly, it sets out with (what I hope was) a message and gets it across with melty deaths. It just isn't much more than that. But, hey...I can say I watched it now.
Horror Rating SystemHorror Qualifier: 6/10
Horror Quality: 6/10
Film Quality: 2/10