Street Trash

dir: Ryan Kruger

2024

I have not seen the original flick this is based on, which was from that country that I refuse to talk about, but thankfully this 2024 remake was made in South Africa, specifically in Cape Town.

And the only reason I was interested in seeing this flick is because I saw Ryan Kruger’s previous flick, being Fried Barry, which was an insane low budget monstrosity that I thoroughly enjoyed, and hoped for a similar experience.

Well…

It’s pretty crude, with a miniscule budget, and, well, it’s not like I had high expectations, but it still managed to let me down. Part of the issue is this – this is a remake of a movie where nefarious government interests develop some advanced evil poison that makes people, upon exposure, start spouting various coloured liquids from their bodies, their faces peeling off, limbs etc doing all sorts of crazy things.

That they were using it against homeless Vietnam veterans in the original, and just anyone who’s homeless in Cape Town in this version, means this doesn’t feel at all like some political statement – it’s just an excuse to have multiple scenes where screaming people have cheap physical effects ooze and pour out all over the place. At first it’s just the poor, but then by the end it’s the rich, so, victory?

Government forces across the world routinely do forced relocations, severe beatings or sometimes just shoot the homeless and disempowered, and that’s not seen as funny or horrific (except for the people it happens to), but if green and blue paint shot out of them instead, well, who wouldn’t laugh at that?

A tiny budget can be an insurmountable obstacle, it can be an opportunity for innovative solutions. Here it’s just an excuse to have the same kinds of scenes repeated beyond the point of nausea, which is ad nauseum.

There is only so many times I can watch someone screaming with paint pouring out of their clothes or mouths or new orifices that appear, before I start yawning. And a lot of this flick is people rupturing all over the place, again and again, until it loses almost all meaning. I was never the biggest fan of that Toxic Avenger Troma body melt horror stuff, and, after watching this, my mind remains unchanged.

Something like this, if it’s going to work at all, depends entirely on the core crew of people fighting against the forces of whatever. It’s a bit of a mixed bag here.

The main guy, being Ronald (Sean Cameron Michael), is fine, is solid. He’s the war veteran homeless guy who’s brought together oddballs and outright perverts into a found family of rejects surviving in the margins of Cape Town society.

His best friend is… problematic to say the least. Chef (Joe Vas) is Ronald’s best friend and former comrade in arms, but he unfortunately engages, with every single line of dialogue, in something I believe is called yiddishkeit, which means he sounds like a Borscht-belt comedian from the 1950s, or Jackie Mason, or even less specifically, like a Jewish chap from Brooklyn, probably born early in the last century.

I do not know or understand why this occurs in this film, or why Chef’s every second word is shmeckle, shmendrick, tuches, oy gevalt or mazel tov. It didn’t feel anti-Semitic, however much it was about stereotyping, but it was still very strange, and not, like, that funny.

His alternative hot takes on classic stories, like the pedo aspects of the Pinocchio story, are just fucking terrible, and not funny, and, they took up so much screen time that all I could think of was that it was filler. Boo, I boo what you’re doing.

It’s a real mystery. Also, I was ecstatic at first, and then somewhat aghast / embarrassed, to see the chap who played the lead in Fried Barry also turn up here as part of the crew, as a character called Two Bit. Two Bit has an unfortunate imaginary / alien friend called, I think, Sockie or Socko or something like that, who screams all of his dialogue, and only Two Bit can hear his constant need to have sex with something or someone or anything, really. It’s an ugly blue puppet, and nothing he says or does is remotely funny, so I don’t know why that’s there either.

The movie begins with a homeless volunteer being strapped to a chair, being given an injection, and then a whole host of horrible things happening to him until his head falls off. On the other side of a window, a government goon, played helpfully by a black South African, thus showing that equality has truly come to South Africa finally, mouths some swears before nodding his head, indicating that their search for the perfect chemical with which to do away with the homeless is finally here.

The mayor of Cape Town has decided that his re-election chances will improve if he just randomly liquefies a whole bunch of homeless people. In this day and age, I wonder if they might make him president of the United States instead.

But it falls to our heroic group of misfits to thwart these terrible plans. I mean, they have these drones randomly spraying poor people with the chemical, they’re putting it in the food they’re giving them, and every now and then, when they’re not doing it randomly, they gas whole groups of homeless just for efficiency’s sake.

And there’s some crime boss underneath where the homeless live called the Rat King, and I’m not even sure why she’s there, but she has henchmen with guns, and they might come in handy, yet their main purpose seems to be to arbitrarily threaten a young woman called Alex (Donna Cormack-Thompson), just to give Ronald and his crew someone to protect.

Alex dresses and acts like a backpacker, which, naturally, makes her easy prey to all the nasties of Cape Town, but she is one of the few middle-class people in the flick, who has ended up on the trash heap thanks to, I dunno, neo-liberalism or something. Something something killed her dad in the mines, and then that broke her mother’s heart, and now Alex is eating out of dumpsters like the rest of the underclass.

But now there’s poison in that there dumpster, Alex, and its purpose is to erase you and all your cursed kind.

Maybe there is charm and some humour to be found throughout the flick, in between the parts that don’t work, are fucking lazy, or that just aren’t funny. I respect the hardscrabble way they try to get it together and try to sustain it through. I found it somewhat funny that occasionally the actors would turn to the camera and refer to a chap they called Offy, who would wave or give a thumbs up or shake his gloved fist occasionally, when it’s clearly the camera operator, but I suspect on something with this budget, it’s Ryan Kruger himself.

There are some sequences, some moments of actual innovation, or where there are scant seconds of decent fight choreography or action stuff done with practical effects and in camera, as opposed to with digital effects or wire work etc. They almost feel like a show reel, like Kruger is trying to say “look, you franchise types, I can do action, I can do comedy, I can do horror; give me a budget and I’ll do something remarkable for you!” I don’t begrudge him that, it’s just that, before and after those scenes are some very shoddy, very cheap looking scenes as well where you worry that the Styrofoam or paint spraying sets are going to accidentally fall over or be set on fire.

The idea that there’s somehow something strong politically being said in this flick is hilarious. That there is something trenchant or powerful being said – honestly, this is about as political as a Transformers movie. People still hate poor people, but they’re also not supportive of liquefying them. It could impact adversely on property values. No-one supports that, not even the homeless.

Acting – this is not a flick to watch for acting, though there are some actors in it, and they do their best, and I suspect they were paid in sandwiches, so hopefully they’re not too disgruntled. I hope they’re reasonably gruntled.

Street Trash - melt the rich, indeed.

6 times I wonder if they should try this chemical out on health insurance executives instead out of 10

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“You don’t want this party turning into a massacre.”
- “Massacre sounds pretty good to me.” - Street Trash