MY CALL: I hope you were looking for a flick that’s all sorts of gross. Because that’s what you’re going to get! MORE MOVIES LIKE Street Trash: Well, there’s obviously the original cult classic Street Trash (1987). For more “melt horror” consider The Devil’s Rain (1975), The Incredible Melting Man (1977), Slime City (1988), The Blob (1988), and Body Melt (1993). And for more South African horror, consider Zygote (2017), Fried Barry (2020) and Gaia (2021).
The future is wrought with corporate monopolies, government control, and an ever-shrinking middle class and growing lower class. Homeless populations have grown tremendously. To solve this problem, the mayor has ordered experiments on vagrants to test a toxic agent called Viper, which literally melts those exposed from the inside-out into piles of colorful gobbledygook.
As if competing with the opening scene from the 1987 original, the first death scene is a spectacle. Guts pour out of the victim’s abdomen onto the floor as he oozes purple slime from his eyes, ears and other orifices, including projectile vomit. His skin pulsates and sloughs off in big chonkety chunks as he screams and peels off his own face. The opening death scene award goes to 1987 in my opinion, but not for lack of a great effort from 2024, which is still extra gross and sloppy!
A goofy nice touch is that one homeless guy (Gary Green; Fried Barry) has a raunchy blue goblin imaginary friend (i.e., drug-induced schizoid delusion). Unfortunately, later in the movie this becomes more tired and annoying than charming and quirky. Also like 1987, there is a long-running severed phallus gag. So, yeah, in case you were wondering—it’s that kind of slapstick movie.
But the gore is why you showed up, right? Faces fall right off of skulls, bones melt and collapse under the victim’s own bodyweight, and slime geysers from bodily orifices. Victims pour out variously colored slime, they pulsate and bubble and rupture, they leave disembodied partially disintegrated limbs behind as they crawl for help, and they all become gross pieces of macabre performance art.
Director Ryan Kruger (Fried Barry) takes the short film-turned cult classic Street Trash(1984, 1987) and contemporizes it with corrupt government officials. This remake is just as deliberately classless as its source material—and I applaud that. The writing, acting, budget, effects and direction feel on par with the original as well. If anything, the greatest improvement is in its pacing. The greatest change is the form and implementation of Viper (just some old, mysterious liquor in 1987), now having a more deliberate RoboCop-ish (1987) utility in this dystopian corporate future. And speaking of RoboCop (1987), one death scene seems to homage the toxic waste mutant exploding when struck by a car.
The final 20-30 minutes are loaded with action. But we just keep seeing the same gore gags over and over again during clumsy action scenes. As much action as there was, I found this final act on the verge of boring with a few momentary exceptions—e.g., an exploding gory breast.
This remake certainly had its moments. But if I’m being totally honest, I favor original. They’re both fun bad movies. Yet 1987 just felt more organically “so bad it’s good.” Whereas this remake is trying too hard to be “so bad it’s good.”