Three laughs: Street Trash

 
It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watvh them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart.

Three laughs case #13:
Street Trash (USA, 1987)
Dir. Jim Muro

Some trash films are meant to be funny, but are so nasty and unapogetic in their approach that most people just think of them being vile. I don't really believe in "guilty pleasures" as such, but there certainly are some movies that might give a bit of a bad impression of you if you go around proclaiming your love for them. Especially today.

Well, I believe thet you can recognize something has problematic ideas and still enjoy it for its other aspects, especially when it comes to humor. Just try to not apply that dirty worldview to your own everyday life. Case in point is 80's trash classic Street Trash, which is certainly dark enough for my sense of humor. But I would never mistake that it is in any way a fair and reasonable portrayal of the homeless and underpriveleged and neither should anyone.

Maybe you could go deeper and see that it carnevalizes some stereotypes and general tropes attached to the lowest of the low. I wouldn't call the film a very fine satire, but it certainly takes some of the 80's ideas about poor people being trash to its extremes. The film depicts a bum's life as a struggle to live on a postapocalyptic sense in a very 80's trash movie style. There are hierarchies and power struggles even when living in a city dump and they are even more dog-eat-dog than you would find in the rest of the society. It is cartoonish and gory and totally ridiculous and that is enough for me to really enjoy watching it.

TRIGGER WARNING That being said, there's some sexual violence against women in the movie that is not funny in the slightest and that I can't condone.

Three laughs:

1. A lot of the beginning of the movie sees a new batch of Viper bottles arrive at a suburban liquor store and a stolen bottle switch owners from bum to bum. Finally when one of them takes a swig at a port-a-potty, we get the  money shot of him melting into a screaming pile of blue goo.

2. A really culturally insensitive, yet a funny scene comes when a psychotic Vietnam veteran dreams of vampiric Southeast Asian monsters stalk him in the night. The hysteria of the overplaying is a good fit for the genuine creepiness, both of the scene itself and of the mindset of one of the movie's many very unlikable characters.

3. The most immature laugh of the movie comes when an overweight wino gets his johnson cut off and it gets thrown around from bum to bum in a game of keep-away. The best part is when the film cuts to the shots of the dick flying through a clear blue sky.