I'd seen Street Trash before, on April 8, 1989. I looked it up and that saturday I went to Sperhauk's to watch a movie, maybe two. Back in those days Friday Night Movies was often on saturday. My Watched Movie List Data Base only shows one new movie for that date and my diary entry only says where I was, not what I watched. I figured since 20 years had passed I probably forgot most everything about the movie. Mind you that's not a high-risk bet since I can't remember what happened to me yesterday or what I watched last week. Usually when I watch some old movie I haven't seen in a while something surfaces but Street Trash didn't seem familiar at all. It all set around a poor section in Oakland. That's across the bay from San Francisco in California in the USA. That's the place that the San Francisco Bay Bridge goes to. Well, if you're in SF obviously. In postcards Oakland's usually covered in fog. I was only in Oakland once for a day or two. Stayed at a hotel for a night to crash an SF convention and next day moved out to the tiny City of Emeryville. That city fronts the bay and is surrounded by Oakland to the east and south and Berkley on the north. We stayed in a modern condo with large glass windows overlooking the bay. It was very nice and we had the place to ourselves. Back in Oakland I saw a giant rat running down the sidewalk. I my head we battled to the death. In reality, I yelled and he kept on going where he was going. There are some nice buildings in Oakland, or there were 20 plus years ago when I was there last. Maybe they tore them all down since. I don't have any digital pictures of my trip and I haven't gotten around to scanning all my paper pictures. These pictures scavenged off the internet will have to do.
Street Trash
takes place on the mean streets of Oakland and it's a bleak dark deadly comedy of errors. A low rent neighborhood liquor store owner finds a 60 year old case of wine in his store basement. He figures he can get a buck a bottle for the stuff. Problem is Viper isn't very good for repeat business. Kills the customer by melting them from the inside out. That's the whole plot pretty much. There's a bunch of characters we meet and most of them are centered around a junk yard. There's a crazed Vietnam vet living there who bullies the other bums. He goes extra crazy and starts killing. That brings the cops. Soon people are dying left and right. It's a wonder anyone made it through the movie. The special effects are ok. They do the job and melt the victims in really gooey ways. The dvd boxes don't quite show the effects to their gooey glory. You can see some of it in the dvd preview trailer. Here's the toilet scene. There are some good pics here and here there is a good pic of the penis flying through the air during the game of keep away played by the bums in the junkyard. It's that kind of movie. The kind not for my mom. There's a bunch of fighting and murder mixed in with some slightly heavy handed social satire and some jokes and scenes that made me laugh.
I didn't laugh as much at Hood of the Living Dead which also takes place in and around Oakland. Total coincidence. Nice when it happens and there is some unplanned connection between the two movies. HOTLD is a low budget picture from the Quiroz Brothers, who've made a dozen pictures in the bay area. Some of it was ok, some of the time. and some of it dragged. It made that 86 minutes seem much longer. The story is one we have heard over and over. Some science guys have a serum that can reanimate flesh. The one guy uses it on his brother after he's killed in a driveby. It's bad in the hood, and in keeping with that theme, the reanimation goes bad, and the kid becomes a flesh eating zombie with good running skills. That spreads and soon there are a bunch of the creeps buggin' out in the hood. The science guys gang up and battle the zombie gang members. It's a blood bath and most everyone dies. The quality of the production varies, as does the makeup. The acting is fair to poor. Sperhauk picked this up from the clearance section at Half Price Books for 80 cents. We weren't sure that we got 80 cents worth of entertainment out of that. 20 cents each maybe.
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