Street Trash Review

Street Trash is available on digitial beginning Tuesday, November 19.

It’s admirable how much thought and energy Fried Barry director Ryan Kruger put into smartening up one of the more notorious examples of splatter cinema for his sophomore feature. But in updating the melting skid-row residents and rainbow-colored gloop of 1987’s Street Trash, he’s miscalibrated his tone. This kinder, sillier, gentler “spiritual sequel” is heavy with story, characters, and meaning – all things that generally impede the cheap thrill of watching fleshy things go pop. It lures us in with the lurid reputation of the original (its opening sequence sets the yuck bar high) and then sits us down for a well-meaning cartoon broadside about social strife.

To underscore his points, Kruger moves Street Trash from Reagan-era New York City to his adopted hometown of Cape Town, South Africa as it might exist in the year 2050. Why he takes this leap to the future escapes me; surely, the racial and economic divides of the country are potent enough to set the story in the present day, when governments and societies blatantly dehumanize unhoused people through hostile architecture and other comically evil practices. For a splatter comedy that takes the added measure to be about something, Kruger leaves a lot of low-hanging fruit on the vine. Instead, he dwells on two prominent concerns: a simplistic take on militarized policing (essentially a rehash of Mitchell and Webb’s “Are we the baddies?” sketch) and African lithium mining (one of the continent’s most conspicuous economic and political footballs). But it’s difficult to appreciate the finer points of Kruger’s message because dick jokes and bucketloads of arterial spray usually precede them.

The new Street Trash centers around Ronald, a graying thief and heavy drug user who dwells among a small community on the streets of Cape Town. His associates include Chef, a Kubrickian nebbish with a knack for perverting fairy tales, and 2-Bit, who wanders around muttering at a scene-stealing sex-positive puppet that only he can see. When Ronald isn’t scoring from his sophisticated drug pusher, he develops a burgeoning father/daughter relationship with young Alex, who loads the film with a tragic backstory full of persuasive waterworks. As Alex, Donna Cormack-Thomson injects Street Trash’s gleeful filth with a sense of humanity and heart, which makes you wonder what her character is even doing in a schlockfest like this in the first place.

Ronald and Alex’s story takes a turn when they unearth a conspiracy led by Cape Town’s unscrupulous mayor to wipe out the city’s unhoused population with a gas codenamed “V,” which – like the corrosive toxin disguised as cheap booze in the first Street Trash – turns people into abstract heaps of candy-colored tubes and limbs. A whacked-out revolution follows, with Ronald and his found family leading the charge. As it happens, little of this anti-capitalist carnage sticks to the ribs as much as some of the heinous stuff director J. Michael Muro put into the original. Kruger’s approach is too self-aware and too sweet.

It’s still capable of a few gnarly thrills, though the repetitiveness of the flesh-melting sequences tested even my high tolerance for practical-effects gore. They’re technically impressive – people rip off their faces in anguish as gigantic pustules explode in a rain of pastel gunk – and hardly boring, but they’re all working from the same oozing, bubbling template. By the fourth time someone explodes after taking in a snootful of V, you might respond by checking your watch.

Muro’s Street Trash is an unfiltered complaint about city crime that ignores its root causes, presented without an iota of modern-day caution – think Death Wish by way of Troma. That’s why the film endures: It allows viewers to wallow in the muck of depravity and also leaves us with the responsibility of feeling bad about it. It’s vicious and uncomplicated. So it makes sense how Kruger went about rehashing the movie, power-washing all its cruelty, sexual assault, and other various forms of unironic sleaze to issue an unambiguous condemnation of the ever-widening class divide that plagues all wealthy nations. Predictably but understandably, Kruger counters Muro’s heartlessness with kindness, his message unmissable: Melt the rich.

But the film is too calibrated and polished to match the ugly, visceral experience Kruger wants to capture. Even his compositions – more expansive and less claustrophobic than Muro’s – make things feel less grimy. Kruger’s softer approach to the material deflates his desire to make a new subversive entry in the splatter genre, its earnest humanity taking the guilt out of a guilty pleasure. It throws in two Wilhelm screams within a minute of each other, features a profane garbage puppet, and nails the details of Muro’s gore effects right down to its viscosity and hue – clearly, Kruger is here to have messy fun. But he’s missing the crucial element that makes underground splatter movies so unforgettable: a willingness to forego sense for the simplicity of slaughter.