Butcher Block is a weekly series celebrating horror’s most extreme films and the minds behind them. Dedicated to graphic gore and splatter, each week will explore the dark, the disturbed, and the depraved in horror, and the blood and guts involved. For the films that use special effects of gore as an art form, and the fans that revel in the carnage, this series is for you.
Chances are you’ll know if low budget exploitation horror film Street Trash is for you before you’ve even see it. Definitely within the first five minutes, which features both male and female full-frontal nudity. Set in a Brooklyn junkyard with a cast of characters comprised mostly of homeless people, the film follows their wacky adventures made even wackier when a local liquor store owner starts selling them Tenafly Viper, 60-year-old hooch that’s gone bad and melts any drinkers from the inside out.
Released in 1987, Street Trash takes the gory practical effects of the decade further by making the blood dayglo colors. Swapping out normal body fluid colors for something more befitting of an electric rainbow makes Street Trash seem a bit less extreme than normal melt horror films, but it’s a pioneer with great practical effects that aren’t afraid to balance the gore with sleazy, crass humor intended to offend.
Directed by James M. Muro, a cinematographer and Steadicam operator known for his work on films like The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and True Lies, Street Trash was initially intended to be his thesis for film school. Surprising no one, including himself, it wasn’t accepted. Besides melting homeless people, there’s a tyrannical Vietnam veteran (named Bronson) ruling violently over the junkyard, race-based arguments and jokes mid-grocery story theft, attempted rape, an overzealous cop, drunk sex, and more. There’s even a game of keep-away involving a severed penis. Because of course.
Fun tidbit: that scene featured three different fake members; the largest -the size of a football- was used for shots that saw the penis getting tossed in the air. The more you know.
Between the New York setting and the humor, Street Trash feels akin to a Troma movie. It’s not, but it does have something else in common with the film production in special makeup effects artist Jennifer Aspinall. Aspinall fell in love with makeup at a young age and moved to New York at the age of 18 to pursue it. But she really got her start in makeup effects on The Toxic Avenger, a low budget romp that taught her the basics thanks to creature work, huge blood gags, prosthetics and body parts. Her next job was special makeup effects on Spookies, a film where Muro happened to be working as a camera operator. They hit it off, and he hired her for Street Trash.
Aspinall designed and even directed a lot of the effects for Street Trash. Even though the colors involved with the melt sequences were abstract, she strove for authenticity in terms of texture and viscosity. The special makeup effects team had a few months to prepare, which went a long way in why Street Trash’s effects look so great despite a lower budget. The most complicated of all wasn’t the melting sequences, though, but Bronson’s death. Aspinall had to build an animatronic severed head that would smile as it looked up a girl’s skirt before dying. Cables, remote controls, motors, and a sculpted head that she’d never actually done before – and it all looks great.
If you’re a fan of sleaze and a whole lot of gooey, crass shenanigans, this formative Melt Movie is a must. It’s goofy, exploitative, over the top, and gory. Underneath it all lurks some wry social commentary, but there’s enough humor happening on screen to distract if that’s not your thing. Street Trash doesn’t hold a candle to the goriest that horror has to offer, but it does present a different type of extreme in envelope-pushing humor. It’s pure cult cinema.
