First Off

I really hope to god I'm the only person on the planet who hadn't seen Street Trash until a few days ago. Seriously. When I think of all the time I wasted in theatres watching crap like Munich when I could have been watching bums play keep-away with a deliciously realistic severed penis... well, no one likes to admit they've wasted their life, but it may be true.

The plot is so loosely woven that when a random element suddenly displays a little relevance, it's like finding the Easter egg full of coke when all you've gotten so far is off-brand jellybeans. At times it feels like two separate movies vaguely connected through a bum with inexplicably clean and glossy hair whose face is covered in shoe polish. On one hand, we have a liquor store owner uncovering a box of 60-year-old Tenafly Viper, which he decides to sell for $1 a bottle to the local winos. The first guy who drinks it dissolves almost instantly into a fabulous blue, green and yellow puddle in a broken toilet. So the Viper is the villain, right? This is a movie about deadly hooch taking out the downtrodden.

Not exactly. On the other hand, we have an emotionally disturbed Vietnam vet with a knife carved from a human femur terrorizing the junkyard over which he prevails. He's the more immediate danger to the protaganist, his kid brother, and their hovel mate, because although the shiny-haired Fred keeps stealing/buying bottles of Viper, he never manages a sip before some other bum comes along and takes them.

As far as plot goes, the rest is pretty inconsequential. Some bums die at the hands of the Bum King, others get ahold of a bottle of Viper. The important thing is that whenever someone dies, it's really gross. There are people melting, exploding, being decapitated, losing penises left and right.... there's a creepy almost-sex-scene between the she-mulletted secretary at the junkyard and Fred's kid brother, a creepier actual sex scene with Fred and a mobster's vomitting girlfriend, there's chicken in people's pants... for the life of me I can't figure out how this movie hasn't replaced It's a Wonderful Life in the holiday rota yet.

Ultimately, the two plots do wander into each other for a gloriously gory finale that's now firmly in my top 10 movie deaths of all time. I'm not speaking to you again until you watch this movie.