Street Trash - I wanted to like this more

I'll start by saying that I'm no 'cinema snob.' Ninety per cent of my DVD collection's titles end in '...of the Living Dead' and I love low budget horror from the eighties with practical special effects.  Therefore, 'Street Trash' should have been everything I've been looking for.  I've even watched it twice now (as I managed to forget everything about it after the first viewing) and I still just can't seem to warm to it.

If you read much of the promotional material about the film you'll see how it says that a liquor shop starts selling bottles of toxic waste to the homeless population of New York, causing them to melt in all sorts of hideous ways.  That's all technically true, but - when you watch the movie - you'll see that that's just a small part of the story.  Yes, the practical effects are brilliant and - for me - definitely the high points of it all.  But it's just a series of random events centred around the homeless who live in a junkyard with no real story tying it together.

First of all the characters are all pretty unlikable.  Even the 'hero' is pretty UNheroic and I didn't really care what happened to him.  The homeless all steal from each other and are only too happy to do one another down in order to get any advantage over their ranks.  Then you have the fact that characters sort of just drift in and out of the story, never really feeling like the film-makers know what to do with them.  Some come at the beginning then aren't seen again until much later in the story - and don't go expecting any real resolution for most of them.

As I say, the effects are great and I loved them all.  Plus the general direction is inventive and I couldn't help but feel that there actually was a good story in there somewhere, it was just a case of the writer wanting to cover too many different areas and not really focusing on one particular subject.  It's worth noting that I'm probably in the minority with my lukewarm reaction to this film.  I've read a lot of other people's comments and most people who enjoy the genre do seem to find this one a real 'hidden gem.' For me I just didn't 'get' this one.

5/10 a hard trek, a bit like unicycling to Mordor and back