“Street Trash” is a review, which I started months back and totally forgot all about until I found it still there on my computer recently. I was interested in this film, because I haven’t gone wrong when watching these eighties cult films. So I decided to give this film a watch.
The film is about two runaways who live in a junkyard. Fred (Mike Lackey) is burnt out by everything that’s going on in life while Kevin (Mark Sferrazza) wants to back into society and live a normal life. Then one day, they find a case of Tenafly Viper in a liquor store. The stuff contains something that makes people who drink it melt into a pile of ooze. It’s changing things in the junkyard, as the homeless are lining up to buy it and it threatens everyone around them.
I was hoping “Street Trash” was going be like “The Toxic Avenger” or “Smile City” going into this film. But as the film went on, I knew that this wasn’t going to end up like those great splatter films. Instead, this film had minor holes in the screenplay that prevented it from becoming that way.
The screenplay written by Roy Fumes (The Substitute) was okay at best. There were some things that I liked about the screenplay. First, I liked the splatter death scenes. Fumes carefully makes sure that those scenes had a gross out factor that makes you want to turn away from the screen. If those scenes weren’t there, this would’ve have been a complete failure considering the grip that I have with the screenplay. The other thing that I liked was the fact that the actions scenes and twisted humor weren’t that bad. I know the development leading to them was a failure, but they managed to grab my attention. He makes sure that it works well with the context of the film. It manages to grab me in the last act.
What made this screenplay shaky was the fact the story felt like it went all over the place. He doesn't do a good job with the way that he approaches his story. I didn't like the fact that the story had too many characters and it shows in the film’s second act. There were characters that Fumes could have done without. Sometimes when a story has too many characters, it has a tendency to go off the rails and the development suffers. This could have been a good screenplay, but it goes into too many different directions.
The direction from Jim Muro was good. I liked, the way that he and special effects team handles all of the splatter scenes. Instead of having the red blood going all over the place, they use a lot of different colors. It made those scenes effective, as it made the effect work and had an original feel to it that you don’t see in most splatter films. It made the scenes have more of an impact than I thought it would have coming in. The other thing that Muro does very well is making the performances aspects work. I liked how Muro carefully makes sure the acting is good enough that you’re into the characters even though there is too many of them in this film. It made up some of the film’s flaws.
I wish I could fully recommend this film, but I can’t. “Street Trash” is a film that could’ve been enjoyable, but a shaky second act hurts this film. Review
Rating: Two and a half stars.
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