Discovering “STREET TRASH”
By Johnny Wallace
The film is from 1987, but somehow it had never crossed my path until just this year. What I saw melted my mind (no pun intended)…
New York, circa 1986. A greasy shopkeeper discovers: VIPER. A high-powered liquor hidden away from the world. A liquor of unknown origins so vile, that, if taken internally, will liquefy anyone into vibrant goo in seconds. That’s where the movie starts… then things get weird.
Violence escalates at the same rate bodies melt from the booze; it’s phenomenal. No single interaction is met without some ramped-up, extreme overreaction. Like a bum cleaning a car window doesn’t just flip the bird when asked to stop, no, they pull the motherfucker from the driver’s seat and slam him through his own windshield. A rogue cop doesn’t just murder an assassin (sent by a criminal kingpin to kill another bum for banging the kingpin’s drunk girlfriend), no, the cop also drags the assassin to a urinal and sticks a finger down his own throat to vomit on the corpse in victory. And what movie is complete without nightmare Vietcong vampire hookers, a dash of necrophilia, a bowie knife carved from human shin bone, or a sliced-off penis used in a game of keep away? Hands down a top ten horror/comedy favorite of mine, and I think it just got a permanent spot on my top-horror-of-all-time list. 10 out of 10 for “drunken-shoplifting-homeless-dudes-crashing-though-a-grocery-store-window”
Johnny Wallace is a freelance writer and is currently a copywriter and data manager for Darkside Releasing.
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