Street Trash

              
J. Michael Muro's Street Trash, from 1987, is an above average exploitation flick. I wouldn't quite call it a good film, but it resembles The Toxic Avenger if that film had had competent direction. Muro integrates the action with fluent camera movements and studied framing. Street Trash proved to be an effective calling card for Muro who has become a successful Hollywood camera operator and cinematographer with credits that include Titanic, Strange Days, and Longmire. 

Street Trash is comic horror splatter set in Brooklyn. A fortified wine named "Viper" is causing imbibers to melt and then explode. Despite previous claims, it is truly the last gasp of action painting in the American cinema. One tolerance for this kind of flick may depend upon whether one can glean humor from a scene in which the cast plays hot potato with a severed penis. Besides drawing from Troma, the film lifts bits from Mad Max 2 and even Platoon, with the swamps of Jersey standing in for Nam. The cast is a collection of mildly talented unknowns with the exception of Tony Darrow, as a mobster who melts, and the unfortunate Ian Bernardo. Not one for the annals of cinema, but, within its seamy genre, this is a relatively handsome and explicable film.