Melt Movie Remake Street Trash Is Disgusting, in Mostly the Right Ways

Horror is arguably the film genre that has been crisscrossed, sliced and divided up into the most bizarre collection of dirty little subgenres over the decades, but even within the world of horror there are few little corners more toxic, rarified and icky than the small collection of films that are colloquially dubbed “melt movies.” Suffice to say, the name is truth in advertising: These are movies where people melt in disturbingly visceral fashion, less in the mold of the Wicked Witch of the West puddling into a neat pile of black robes, and more in the sense of a person howling in pain as their jaw falls off, their limbs rip at the sockets and multicolored ooze bursts forth from every pore. It will perhaps not surprise you to know that there really aren’t many entries in said genre: The most prominent and foundational are 1970s-1990s entries like Slime City, The Stuff, The Incredible Melting Man and Body Melt, along with honorable mentions like Chuck Russell’s 1988 remake of Cold War drive-in classic The Blob. But the most famous member of this gruesome gallery–in relative terms, of course–would probably be 1987’s Street Trash, the most archetypal example of a grindhouse-style story about a city’s destitute hobos and winos being reduced to puddles of goo by a mysterious, poisonous bottle of hooch known as “Viper.”

And now in 2024, Street Trash has a modern remake, courtesy of British director Ryan Kruger, a prolific helmer of music videos and short films who made the leap to profane, drug-addled features via 2020’s well-received sci-fi/horror-comedy hybrid Fried Barry. Like that film, he sets his version of Street Trash in South Africa, but deploys it in the midst of a dystopian near future where a brutal and oppressive government and its villainous mayor (Warrick Grier) intend to solve the crisis of homelessness and drug dependence by simply melting away all of society’s undesirables. It’s cheaper than building housing, right? Let me state, for the record: If that joke feels tasteless to you, then you are not going to be the target demographic for Street Trash. This is a mordant horror comedy, one that deploys its “satire” in sledgehammer blows without any degree of subtlety whatsoever. It at times ventures rather pointlessly far into the bounds of sophomoric tastelessness, but at the same time is rescued by its outstandingly gross visual effects, surprisingly solid performances and biting (and intentionally stupid) humor. It’s a shotgun blast of genre influences, and a good number of the pellets land with grisly impact.

Which is all to say: Street Trash is surprisingly effective for a film that you would likely figure would be struggling to justify itself as a remake. But then again: Is this not the kind of film that the indie horror directors of the world really should be remaking? The original Street Trash is really only remembered by the most gnarled genre obsessives out there, people with a fondness for ’80s practical effects and grossout humor. It’s not like there’s some big, rabid fanbase out there waiting to be disappointed by how Kruger decides to handle this material, nor will the writer-director feel compelled to simply ape every element of the prior film. That kind of freedom to do your own thing is rarely afforded to filmmakers these days when they’re creating remakes of genuinely beloved properties.

And indeed, this version of Street Trash really isn’t in the same tonal ballpark as the 1987 original. That movie was misanthropic in the extreme, depicting the seedy NYC slums where even the supposed protagonist homeless are largely just as despicable and tyrannical as the broken social system that put them there. The new Street Trash on the other hand has no reservations at all about immediately casting its collection of transients and drug addicts as its unabashed heroes, starting with protagonist Ronald (Sean Cameron Michael), a sort of cheerful, streetwise peacemaker and addict who attempts to protect all the junkies and thugs from both each other’s darkest impulses and the wanton abuses of the city’s aggressive police state. This boils down the story to a simple us-vs-them, good vs. evil duality–more well intentioned than the original, less a cynical indictment of human nature and more a fantasy about overthrowing the societal power structures holding us down. I imagine that Kruger would probably be happy with some kind of comparison to the biting urban satire of a filmmaker like Larry Cohen, but Street Trash is too simple and straightforward in its message to really call Cohen to mind as might be intended. More than anything else, especially with the ridiculously crass jokes, sexual gags and violence, what it actually calls to mind is something like Jordan Downey’s “classic” holiday horror parody Thankskilling. Make of that what you will. Its sense of humor is perhaps best summed up by the fact that it doesn’t just stick in the customary Wilhelm Scream for a single quick film geek joke, but proceeds to use it half a dozen times or more as people are shot or blown up off screen, turning the gag into a running joke on the trope’s overexposure.

Of course, what will actually matter most to the kind of genre obsessives tracking down Street Trash now is the quality of the deaths and visual FX, and on that front you can only consider the movie an unqualified success. This one wastes absolutely no time–five minutes in, you’ve already got a guy melting and ripping his limbs off in excruciating detail. Genitals are severed, in reference to the 1987 film’s most infamous moment. A melting guy gets hit by a truck and explodes into goo in a seeming Robocop reference. The comic ultraviolence only continues to top itself, every death finding new ways to spew multicolored slime out of every orifice. It’s every bit as extravagantly excessive as you would hope it to be, coupled with amusingly morbid humor–like the bit where a street sweeper truck patrols the area to clean up all the discarded body parts. The closest recent comparison might be something like Steven Kostanski’s campy FX-fest Psycho Goreman, but Street Trash is another level more foul. This could eventually lead to its desensitized audience checking out, but it’s also brought together with fine visual verve by Kruger and cinematographer Fabian Vettiger, who prove they can both shoot a kinetic chase scene and evoke the sci-fi corporate dystopia of Cape Town in the vein of the police state of Half Life 2. A film like this doesn’t necessarily need beautiful, heavily stylized and colorful lighting cues, but it ultimately uplifts it immensely.

At the same time, though, Street Trash occasionally threatens to derail itself through just how joyfully it embraces its dumbest elements and crass humor even when the jokes aren’t landing. There’s a constant stream of racial stereotyping and dumb dick jokes that some audience members will simply come to resent in short order, a reliance on edgelord provocateur material in the moments when the film doesn’t know what else to do. In particular, one character (Fried Barry‘s Gary Green) has a filthy mouthed, bald-headed, blue-skinned “imaginary friend” named Sockle that only he can see, played by a grotesque puppet. The only function of the character is to mouth off a constant stream of swears, quips and sexual exclamations, which quickly makes him borderline insufferable. He feels like the worst protagonist of a rejected Adult Swim series you’ve ever been unlucky enough to encounter. This stuff can make Street Trash feel like a chore for minutes at a time.

Ultimately, though, there are just as many ideas that elicit genuine chuckles–like one character who is never seen and never speaks, but occasionally shows up via a first-hand perspective shot of his hands. All the other characters talk to this apparent mute, and he serves no story function: He’s just a pure excuse for visual gags, which are consistently funny. The script is also littered with strange, rambling, casual conversations between both good guys and henchmen throughout, feeling like a cross between the pop-cultural minutia discussions of Clerks and the “evil workplace” mundanity seen among the henchmen of The Venture Bros. These bits draw enough laughter to cover for “cultural satire” that is so blunt and obvious that it somehow circles all the way past cringe and back to amusement–like a bit with a upper class businessman on the street in a suit and tie, talking into his phone: “Yeah, it’s the world’s first vegan cryptocurrency, SoyCoin!” Street Trash is peppered with such groaners, but coupled with its more than competent shooting, editing and lead performances, they make for a somehow endearing whole.

At the end of the day, that’s what matters–that, and the melting, and there’s plenty of melting. Not bad, for a remake of a film that was always every bit as trashy as the name would imply. Street Trash is having a blast as it turns most of its characters into puddles of goo, and that’s all you can really ask of it.

Street Trash is produced by Justin Martell and Matt Manjourides of US-based studio Not the Funeral Home (The Last Drive-In With Joe Bob Briggs, Hell Hole, Black Eyed Susan).

Director: Ryan Kruger
Writer: Ryan Kruger, Roy Frumkes, J. Michael Muro
Stars: Sean Cameron Michael, Donna Cormack-Thomson, Joe Vaz, Gary Green, Shuraigh Meyer, Lloyd Martinez Newkirk, Suraya Rose Santos, Warrick Grier
Release date: Nov. 19, 2024 (VOD)

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.