Street Trash (1987)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 1987
	Director: James M. Muro (more known as camera operator on many movies like Terminator 2, Predator 2, The Abyss, Titanic, X-men 2, The Chronicles of Riddick...)
	Actors: Mike Lackey, Bill Chepil, Vic Noto
	Country: USA
	Genre: Horror, Black Comedy
	Conditions of visioning: 17.11.2014, Blu-ray, Home cinema
Synopsis: In the worst part of town, a lunatic Vietnam veteran controls a group of hobos. One of them buys a bottle of old cheap liquor that will have the most devastating effect.
Review: I remember hearing about this movie from a friend 20 years ago. It was typical of what we could find in the Horror section of our local Video Club. He told me that hobos drink a kind of alcohol that makes them melt! I had actually never seen the movie myself but now I could fix that and appreciate it in the best possible conditions. This "Meltdown edition" was produced with great care (great image and sound), even including a sticker for you to reproduce your own bottle of the terrible liquor, and a feature-length documentary about the making of the movie that I have yet to watch. Street Trash is inspired by a 15-min short film of the same name that the director shot in 16 mm (also provided on the Blu-ray). The short film focuses on the cursed liquor, while the movie adds much more around it, and the meltdowns occur only sporadically and are not the heart of the story. So between those gooey moments (all of them well made and producing an effect unique to this movie), we follow the violent life of those hobos struggling to survive, grow up (the two heroes are teenage brothers), eat, drink, fuck. The characters are all exaggeratedly colorful (the owner of the garage, his secretary trying to help the hobos, the determined cop and of course the mad chief of the hobos), reminding me actually of a Troma production like Toxic Avenger or Poultrygeist. The actors are not too bad and portray a very cruel society, which is why I classified the movie as Black Comedy as well. So this is what I will remember from this movie: hobos living in a car wreck junkyard (the two brothers live under a tire pyramid!) and occasionally melting down into a colorful and disgusting puddle.
Rating: 5 /10